Design a Hand Lettered Font on Your iPad

1. Design a Hand Lettered Font on Your iPad: Hi everyone. I'm Liz Colin Brown. I'm an artist, designer, and, teacher. Today I want to show you how to design a font on your iPad and Procreate. I create fonts on my iPad and sell them on Creative Market to make a little extra passive income. I want to show you my whole process from start to finish so you can start creating fonts for personal or commercial use. First we plan out our font using vintage lettering inspiration, and then test out some letter styles before diving in and designing the whole letter set. I'll show you some of the fonts I have made as an example so you can use my fonts as inspiration to create your own or come up with your whole own font-style. Next we'll draw each letter by hand and procreate. You can create a font with a handmade feel and even include some texture, outlines, and, other decorative elements. Next, we'll piece the font together and tweak the spacing and sizing of each letter combination. I will show you how I list the font for sale in my Creative Market shop so you can decide if selling fonts is right for you. The amazing thing about this process is that you can create beautiful fonts with a handmade feel using only your iPad without needing any other equipment. Hand lettering is so popular right now, but a lot of people just don't have time to learn how to hand letter, which is why creating fonts with a handmade feel is such a marketable way to use your love of lettering to share your work with the world and make a little extra income. We'll be using two different apps to design and piece the font together. The first is Procreate and the second is IFont. Those are the only paid apps that you'll need for this process. Other than that, you'll just need your iPad and a stylus. Let's get started. 2. Downloads and Resources: The first thing we'll do is get some inspiration for our font style and plan out all of the letters. I want to share some downloads and resources with you that will make this process easier. You can find a link to get to the Downloads and resources section and the Project section on Skillshare. Make sure you're viewing Skillshare in a web browser, not the app because the Project section doesn't show up on the app. Once you click on that link you'll see that you need a password to get into the page, and I'll share the password on screen right now. Once you get into the page, you'll see a list of resources that we'll be using throughout the class. The first is the Letter Styles Inspiration Boards, so I'm going to start there. If you have the Pinterest app, it'll open the app. You can use any of these as your inspiration. I would probably stick to the add, signs, and partial alphabets or whole alphabets. But if I just click on one of these as an example, you can scroll through and start getting an idea of what you could do with one of these fonts. We're probably going to simplify whatever we find here, because fonts tend to be a little bit more simple than what you see in regular hand-lettering. Let's take this one for example. I really like these curved serifs on the bottom, it's just like two little loops. That would be a good idea for a font. You could create these bars and then do these little loops on the end of each letter. You could create a new Pinterest board and save some of these that you really like, or you could just take screenshots as you scan through. I probably would stick to a serif or a sans-serif font at this point. Cursive fonts pose a little bit more of a challenge, so that's a good thing to do down the road. I'll show you one of the cursive fonts that I created, but for now it's probably good to stick to something a little more simple just to get to know this process. Here's a really nice one. Really thin bars, really tiny little serifs. Some of the letters are super wide and some are super thin, so you get this nice interesting contrast between the two. You could even do one set that's thick and one set that's thin and package them together, and say, "This is a set." You can mix and match. You could also do something like this that's more of a simple monoline. I do recommend looking for something simple. Of course, I want you to feel free to copy me and do everything as I do it in this class. If you're not ready to choose a style, just go ahead and copy the style I'm using. So you don't have to worry about starting from scratch. Here's another one. As I'm scrolling through this, I'm thinking of all these parts I want to create. Really chunky, really flat edges, so you could use a brush that has a really flat edge and just scrape through all these letters. That would be a really cool chunky font. Something like bubbly, that one's fun. It doesn't have to be reinvention of the wheel here. You can take an idea and play around with it, and do something similar. This page has endless ideas, nearly endless. Then if you go to the ads, signs, and partial alphabets you're not going to see the whole alphabet, so you're going to have to really use your imagination to figure out how you could make this work on a larger scale. Like this one for example. We've got really thin, some are really low bars here. This is a really interesting r. It's super thin. Some of these letters are really thin, the larger ones are thicker. You could play around with how you could turn that into a whole alphabet, just using what you see here as inspiration. I'm not really going to go much deeper into letter styles in this class because I do that in a lot of my other classes. I also do that in my book on hand-lettering on the iPad and Procreate. We go through and find a vintage alphabet set and then turn it into letters. If you're really unfamiliar with the lettering process and you're not even sure how to start from the very beginning to create any kind of letters, then I would really recommend this book. We're just practicing with some letters you see here. I also have a couple of other lettering classes that can help you get started with lettering if you're just feeling like a total newbie and you're not sure where to start. Otherwise, if you're ready to go ahead and dig in and just choose a letter style or copy me, let's go ahead and get started. 3. Planning Your Font Style: I'm going to go back to the resources page. Down here it says download the class workbook, download this smaller version. Some older iPads with less capacity need that smaller version. I'm going to download the class workbook. I clicked on it once, so it opened it in Dropbox and then you can tap the three dot menu, and export from Dropbox to open and Procreate. Alternatively, you can tap and hold, open in a new tab and then it downloads the file in a new tab, and then you can press download. This is Chrome as my browser, so maybe try that if you have any trouble. Also, I have a troubleshooting page on my website if you have any trouble. I'm just going to scan through the apps here. Tap more, tap Procreate. It's going to open whatever document I had open last, so I'm just going to go back to my gallery, get out of that stack, and there's that workbook that I just imported right here at the very top of my gallery. I'm going to tap on that because I want to show you a little bit of an example of what happens, when you create a font out of a hand lettered object. Here's an example of the drawing that I created to create my road trip thought. You can see my road trip thought is pretty simple, big block letters with a line through it. It's not super complex, but it's actually been pretty popular on Creative Market surprisingly. Do feel free to go with something pretty simple because you don't need to go way overboard to create a beautiful font. What you're seeing here is these big lines cutting through, and you're also seeing all these little tiny dots, all this texture here. There's a lot going on, on these letters. Now I'm going to go down here to where it shows the font. You can see it's still got a little bit of that roughness, but you're losing a lot of the texture, a lot of the variation. That's just because of the way fonts work. Apps and programs aren't built to accept vectors that are this complex for every single letter. Imagine if you typed an entire page with letters like this, they would be so many vector points on the page, the program would just crash. It just is impossible to make a font with this much texture, but you can get that same feel when we vectorize and simplify a letter. I really wanted to show you that before you start drawing letters, because I don't want you to spend all this time making a beautiful texture, and then get into it and realize, oh, I'm going to lose all that beautiful texture and that's frustrating. Just take a look at that, zoom in on your iPad so you can really see what possibilities we're working with in terms of texture. Once you have a good idea of that concept, let's make that layer invisible and go to the next group on the layers panel. What you're going to see is the alphabet is the first group, numbers and symbols as the second group, and then some kerning stuff that we're going to get into later, so we won't need that until later on. I'm opening the alphabet group. The first object is the text. I just created these letters here so that you have something to start with. Of course, I'm not expecting you to copy these letters. You can if you want. I created these, feel free to start with that as your base. But it's really just a reminder of what all you need to fill in to be able to create this font. I would say alphabet is required, and numbers and symbols are optional. Of course you need letters in your alphabet, but you don't necessarily need numbers and symbols in every single font. I'm going to leave that there as optional for you. What you can do is open up this group, and create a new layer above it. You can also reduce the opacity of that text layer if you don't want to see it at all, or you just want to see in a little bit. I'm going to go to that new layer, get black as my color, and you can really grab any brush here. I didn't create a brush set for this class because I know that everybody's going to want to use a different brush. As you've seen, because we lose so much texture, it doesn't matter what brush you use. Maybe go to the calligraphy section or some other section that you really like, and just choose a brush that works for you. I just made this brush for my last class, which is called combining lettering and illustration and procreate. If you want this specific brush, you can grab that through that class. I'm just going to start by playing around with ideas. There's a letter shape. I'm going to get a smaller brush. One idea I have is to flare like this. We got really steep flare on every letter. I'm really just sketching. I'm not going into a ton of detail here, and I'm really just playing around with ideas. Sometimes what I'll do is just do letter A in a few different ways. If you took some screenshots on that Pinterest page, you could pull those up here. Here's one as an example, I really liked these just simple serifs. I'm going to do one of those. It's just like a, that's a little bit big. Then it swoops down. I'm exaggerating it because I'm really just using this as a starting place. You can start like this. This is how I tend to do it. I don't always sketch the outlines of letters. Sometimes I just dive in like this, because I like to be able to see what it looks like in it's chunky form. Sometimes if you sketch something, you're not really getting an idea of what the letter looks like in its full form. That's why I tend to sketch in this way, like filling in with a big chunky marker. There's a couple of different As, let's do one more. We could do straight, really super straight just like triangles, coming off for the ends of these. There's three ideas, and of course you can play around with as many ideas as you want. I'm going to go with something in between this and this. I don't like quite so much of an angle, and I don't like quite so much of this steep slope, so I'm going to meet in the middle. This one, I think I'll save that for a whole other font because that's like its whole own thing. I think it would also look cool if I just erased some lines out of it here, and let that be the font. I feel like that's got its whole own life ahead of it. These are going to be more my inspiration. This is just to show you how I might brainstorm in the beginning to get started with this process. Take your time with this, figure out what letters you want to use or of course, copy me as I move forward in the next steps. 4. Drawing the Letters: Once you've decided on a style for your font, it's time to start building the letters. Remember if you can't decide on a style it's fine to copy me so you can learn this process, and then you can jump back in later and create your own style once you know the font-making process. Remember that this is probably your first font, may be your first font ever. Probably not going to be your best font ever, so that's totally fine. The point of this is to learn the process, not to make the perfect font. Let's go ahead and start building our letters. I'm starting out on this same workbook page, and I've created a new layer above this text layer. The first thing I like to do is set the thickness of the letter. Using that inspiration that I created before, I'm just going to have that on a separate layer nearby so it's available if I need it. It looks like this thickness is working pretty well, so I'm going to stick with that. I'll just make those little tests layers invisible. The first thing I like to do is just go through and set the thickness on every single letter. I find that it's a little bit easier for me to just conceptualize the whole alphabet if I do the thickness first. Of course, you can draw a letter by a letter or you could do a few test letters first. Whatever you want to do here, go with whatever works for your style. I'm just going to go ahead and draw each of these out. Now that I have my thickness set I'm going to make that original alphabet below invisible, so all I can see is this alphabet. Create a new layer and make my thickening layer invisible. Get a smaller brush, and start creating those serifs that we talked about. I didn't like this super angle and I didn't like this super slope, so I'm going to go with something that's a little bit more subtle and just gives the letter some chunkiness at the bottom. All I'm doing is, as you can see outlining each of these sections. I color drop to fill that in. Then there may be little things that aren't perfect and I'm just going to go through. Of course, you could use a more smooth brush. This is the brush set from my lettering and illustration class. You could do something really smooth, so that the edge of your letters are super smooth if that's what you want to go for. Decide here what works better for your style. I'm really into the rough and chunky brush right now, so I'm just going to go with that. But of course, go with whatever works for you. I'm just going to repeat this same process on every single letter. I'm not going to make you watch me do that because that would be very boring, but I'll show you the time-lapse here so you can see that I really did every letter exactly the same. Just adding that little bit of flair to the bottom of every single letter, and then I repeated that same process with the numbers and symbols. Again, you don't have to do numbers and symbols. It really depends on what your purpose is for this font. If you're just using it for personal use on your own projects, then fill out whatever parts you want to have in your font. If you're going to sell your font, you probably do want to include letters, numbers, and symbols, but that may be something you want to leave for later on. Take your time here, but also consider that this is your first spot. You don't have to include everything and you can always go back and add stuff to your font, which I do all the time. 5. Vectorizing and Testing: Once you're happy with how all of your letters look, it's time to start piecing the font together in iFont. We'll go through a process of exporting from Procreate. Importing into an app that helps you vectorize called Adobe Capture, and then piecing each letter together in iFont. It's a three-step process, but we're going to take it slow and we're going to do a little bit of testing first so that you don't do your entire alphabet before testing a few letters first. I'm starting out here with my alphabet that I just completed. One important thing here is to make the background invisible and to make the guides invisible. All you want to have on this page when you close this document is letters, nothing else. I'm going go back to the gallery. There's the document. I'm going to tap select, tap on it and duplicate. Tap the x, this is my original. I guess I already named this original, but of course you will have to do that for the first time. This is my original and I'm going to name this duplicates. I'm never going to touch that original because there will be times when you want to go back to that document, change something, or use this as a template to create a new font. Maybe I want to create a lined version of the same font, going through and adding lines to each of these. If I already have this doc available, then that's going to save me a ton of work. Always, always, always save your originals. This duplicate, we can do whatever we want. I need 26 of these because I'm going to crop each letter individually so that each letter has its own document like this. I'm going to tap select, tap on that document and duplicate it four times, so I have five. Now we can select the five. I've got five, duplicate that. I've got 10, duplicate that. I've got 15, 20, 25, select one, duplicate it. Now I've got 26, one for every letter of the alphabet. I'm going to go into each document, tap on the actions menu, canvas, crop and resize. First we're going to get A. You don't have to go super close, but you don't need a ton of white space around it, so just crop it as close as is comfortable. Tap done. Back to the gallery. We're just repeating the same process over and over. This is a good time to put on your favorite music and just work on cropping all of these. There's a little bit of this busy work when it comes to building a font. Take your time here, crop out every single letter, and by the end you should have every single letter of the alphabet and then your original remaining. I've actually already done this. I'm not going to do this on camera because you've seen exactly how this process goes. What we're going to do next, once you have everything cropped, is export these into a program that vectorizes them because fonts need to be made out of vectors then when we bring them into the iFont app it's already a vector, so we've got everything taken care of. You're going to need two different apps for this process. If you go back to the downloads and resources page, they're both linked on here. iFontMaker app, that is a paid app but if you're selling your fonts, you're going to make back your money pretty quickly so it's worth the money if you ask me. The Adobe Capture app is free. Go ahead and download both of those, and then we can do the next part of this process. First thing I need to do is get these letters out of Procreate into my Photos app. I'm going to select, and you probably know you can just drag in Procreate, select a lot of things. I'm just selecting A through Z. I'm not going to do my numbers and symbols on camera here because it's the exact same process as the letters. You can imagine what goes into that process. I'm going to tap share JPEG and save 26 images. I'm just saving those to my camera roll. If I go to Adobe Capture and I'm going to swipe up from the bottom here, grab that Photos app and put it over here. That's going to allow me to drag photos into Adobe Capture. It saves you a little bit of time from tapping import, choosing a location on and on. You can only do one at a time. I'm going to grab that A, drop it into Adobe Capture. As soon as it opens it, you'll see some options on the screen. There are a lot of things you can play around with here. I'm going to show you the only two or three things that I ever use. The first one is this. I don't know what it's called, but I'm going to call it threshold because it changes how much detail is in your vector. I tend to just bump it up because sometimes if there's like a little hole or two on your letter, bumping it up will get rid of that. Then you've got this nice clean line. I'm going to tap the check symbol. I've got this nice chunky vector. But let's say for example, we've got a little problem here, we've got a little black line sticking out or we've got a little white dot somewhere in there. We're on this section that says refine, and then there's this paintbrush, if you tap on that, you can actually draw and add to your vector. I'm going to tap back to undo that. If there was a little white dot there, I could just go, boop, it's gone. Tap done. We can also erase. There's an eraser right here. Let's say there was a little extra corner there, I can just cut that off. Now I have a clean vector. I'll tap back to undo that. But you get the idea. We've got a brash and we've got an eraser so you can edit your vector on this page. You can also use this smoothing option. We tap Smooth, and then it's off right now. If I tap on, it totally changes how my letter looks. If you want this smooth look, then this would be great. If you like the chunkiness then stick with that. Everything looks good to me, so I'm just going to tap save. Then you have to tap save again to add it to your Adobe Capture library. I'm going to repeat that same process, drag in the B, bump up the threshold. I don't need to change anything with the brush, so save, save. What this is doing is it's turning it into a vector. We can bring it into the Adobe Capture app and it's already vectorized. What I'm going to recommend to you is starting with ABC, not doing the whole process at first because you may get in into iFont and decide, oh, I don't really like how this aspect looks and I want to change my whole alphabet. I always do this in little parts before I do the whole alphabet, because I don't like to waste a lot of time on an alphabet that I end up hating. For now let's just do ABC. Swipe that Photos app out of your way. I'm going to open iFontMaker. Let's see, I had something open. Let me just go back to the home screen. This is the home screen that you'll see when you log in. You can tap new to create a new document. That doesn't really do much, so I don't ever use that button. I'm just going to tap "New". So it's just starting me out on A. Then up here is where you choose what letter you're working on next. I'm working on A, so I want to make sure the A not the a is selected. I've gotten the A selected. Back to Adobe Capture. Tap one one export as SVG. Then as the program I'm going to choose "iFontMaker". Then it just drops that A vector right in there. I'm tapping the Move Tool down here because I want to move it into place. One thing to think about here is the font that you're starting out with is really important because it determines the kerning, also known as spacing of your letters. Let me turn on this light so you can see a little bit better in this app. Down here on this T, I'm going to tap that. You can see that you can change the font that displays here. If you can choose a font that has a similar width to your letters, it's going to save you a lot of work when you get to the point where you're deciding how your letters are spaced. For me, this font is looking pretty good because the bottoms of it right right are pretty close to this A. So I'm happy with that. If you were doing something thinner, of course, go with a thinner font. You can even download a font and open it in iFont. Here's a condensed font that you could use for really skinny letters. Think about that before you get going with your whole font. This Move Tool lets you move this around. Another thing you may want to adjust before you start dropping all your letters in here is these little guides. If you tap the layout symbol here, it says DRAG GUIDES TO ADJUST. I can move all these guides around so that it'll help me drop my letters in there in the right place. I'm going to leave them as they are with this font, but I've worked with other fonts where I did have to adjust it. I just want to let you know how you do that. There's A. Back to Adobe Capture. Tap the three dots symbol, export as SVG. IFontMaker. I failed to go to the next letter. This will happen to you. I'm going to tap "Back, Back, Back". We're going to get rid of that B, and then go over to B up here. Then tap the scissor symbol, paste imported SVG paths. We're dropping the B in the right place. Now that I want to put C in, before I close iFontMaker tap the C. Back to Adobe Capture, export as SVG. Choose "iFont" and "iFontMaker", tap the Move Tool and adjust that. This is the right way to do it, but of course, I just wanted to show you the wrong way to do it so that you could see how to paste imported SVG paths. There's A B C. That's what A B C looks like in my font. I can tap "Preview" up here. Tap "Kerning". Tap this x symbol, and just tap "A B C", capitals only. Now, I can get an idea of what my font is going to look like. Just type a few letters so you can look around. One thing I'm noticing is that C looks a little dinky compared to the A and B. I'm already noticing things I want to change, but overall I like how this looks. I'm happy with the flair. I'm happy with the size of these letters, the thickness of these letters. If you get to this point and you're not happy with how that looks, of course, you need to go back to Procreate, redo your letters, or maybe redo how you vectorize these. So things are a little different. Otherwise, you can go ahead and repeat the same process with every single letter of the alphabet. I'm not going to do that on camera. Of course that would be boring. I would just be doing the exact same thing for every letter. What I do want to show you is how you can use your uppercase letters for lowercase letters like I did for my vintage advertising font. The way I would do that is go to my A, tap the scissor symbol. Copy all. Go to the A over here, tap the scissor symbol and tap "Paste". Now, I've got that A over here and I can tap the Move Tool, and just put that into place. I could repeat the same process with B and C. Again, this is where you really need those guides. If you need to adjust your guide so that your height for your lowercase letters is really clear, you can go to back to that Layer section here and adjust those guides. I'm happy with how that looks. Copy, back to C and paste. Now that I have lowercase and uppercase if I go back to that Kerning section, I can look at how the lower and uppers work together. Of course, we're going to have to do a lot of work to adjust the spacing on this spot, but you can see how I got to this point. I just vectorized each of these letters, stuck it in iFont, and then optionally stick in the lowercase smaller version. If you don't want to do the smaller version, what I do recommend is at least copying this bigger version and pasting that on this page. That's because if someone is going to use your font, even if it's an all caps font you want to be sure that even if they're using lowercase as they're typing they're still getting you letters when they type. Even if you're just doing an all caps font, go ahead and paste that all caps or the capital letter on the capital version and the lowercase version so that your font is really easy to use once someone types upper or lowercase letters. 6. Kerning: Once you have all of your pieces pulled together in iFont, you should have at least all of your capital letters, and then the option of doing lowercase letters as well, the option of doing numbers, and the option of doing symbols as well. So you have to decide here what all you want to do and how far you want to go. Of course, if this is your first font, I would keep it as simple as possible and just go through the whole process with as few letters as possible. Another option if you keep scrolling down on this top section is Latin accent, Latin extension. If you want to make this available for other languages other than English, this is definitely a possibility. I have typically only done the English alphabet A through Z capital and lowercase, and these numbers and symbols that you saw in the workbook. I've gotten a few people on Creative Market who have asked me for the other language support. I haven't done that yet because it's a lot of extra time and I'm not sure if it's marketable to my specific audience, but hopefully, that's something I can add in the future. You can decide whether or not that's something that you personally want to do. The next thing I need to do after you've inserted every single piece of your font is basically to check it and adjust the spacing. This is where choosing that original font that's underneath my pieces that I created is really important, because if you tap on Kerning, the spacing that you see here is exactly what that original font had. If your original font matches the font you created, then you're not going to have a ton of work to do. But if you are, for example, like I did, creating letters that are totally different from your original font, then you're going to have a lot of work for the spacing. And I did have a lot of work for the spacing here. I've worked on this a little bit, so it wasn't a total mess when you saw it. But when you first pull yours in here, it may be out of whack and you have to do a lot of work to clean it up. Here's an example, the word, "They." See, the Y has so much space right here? It needs to just come over a hair, and then it looks a lot better. It almost looked like it was two different words, the Y, so I just need to pull that together. Then every time your font has an E and then a Y, that is fixed. You only have to go through and adjust this for each letter combo one time. I'm going to pull apart that O and C because they're almost touching. This is a long process and you need to have a lot of different types of texts to check your font. So if you open up the workbook and you go to the layer called Kerning Text, this is some of the stuff that I used to check my font. I'm going to go to this capital and lowercase combo section, double-tap to copy that, tap "Copy. " Go to iFontMaker, tap this X, tap one time, and tap "Paste". Then I can go through and check all of the spacing for my upper and lowercase letters. You can see, for example, with this AH, there's a little bit more space here than there is between AG. So I'm just going to bump that over a little bit. I made this list for you of every upper and lowercase combo, I think. Almost every combo that you would ever see in the English language anyway. You can scroll through here and make sure that all of your uppers and lowers look good together. After you do that, there are many different ways to kern your font, and if you ask 50 font makers they'd probably all tell you something different. The years are a good way to check your numbers. This is the Oxford 3000 and the Oxford 5000. These are the most common words in the English language. I think that's a good one to check. I'm going to copy that link, pasting that into a browser, and then you tap "Download." You can choose the Oxford 3000 or 5000. I'm going to go with 3000. Then you can just copy. I'm just going to select all and copy. One downside of this kerning page on iFont is it doesn't go on to infinity; it runs out. Let's see. I copied 3,000 words and it only pasted through A. So you would have to go back and copy different sets if you wanted to use this list. I think this would be a very systematic way to do it. It's also a very boring way to do it, so you have to go with what works for you. One thing I like to do is go to Wikipedia and just search for something. I searched for coffee here. I'm going to copy that and scroll down and copy a big section about coffee. Tap "Copy." Back to iFontMaker kerning page, and tap "Paste". Now I can read about coffee and check my font at the same time. It's a little more interesting. I would say, do whatever will make you kern for the longest amount of time. If you need it to be something about coffee to make it more interesting for you, then that's what you should do because kerning is so important. You don't want someone to get your font and start typing and see that the Es and the Rs are two spaced apart and every time they typed the word "ARE," it's like "AR E." So that's really important to take a lot of time and test your font with a lot of different types of text. You really could not only spend a ton of time on this yourself, but you could put your font in some Word program and send a letter to your friend or send them a document and say, "Can you read this and tell me if any of the spacing looks weird?" Because you may miss over some things that other people would be able to see. Check it yourself. Maybe get someone else to help you check it. Get some coffee, step away from it for a while and come back the next day. Kerning is not something I do after I make my font. It's something I do the next day or the day after or a week later. For me, building fonts is a long process. I don't do it all in one sitting. I don't think you're going to do a good job if you do it all in one sitting. You're going to be tired and making little mistakes. So it's better to come back to it and just get a fresh mind. One thing to think about with spacing is the space between each letter should be similar in volume. If you could picture pouring some water in-between these two letters, the volume of that water should be similar to the space over here and over here. Spacing isn't really a thing where you would put a bar in between each letter and that should be even. It's more about this overall white space in between that you need to look out for. You've been reading your whole life so you have a sense of when something looks a little bit weird, like that. It says, "wa" and then "ter" instead of "water." We're just going to scoot those back together and then it looks right. So use your intuition here and remember this is a handmade font. It doesn't have to be perfect. This isn't one of those sleek, perfect fonts that you see. It's playful. It's fun. It can have a little bit of inconsistency. Also, you can always go back and edit your font. So if you're ever using it or if you sell it and a customer says, "Hey, these two letters are too close or too far away," you can fix it, upload the new file, send the file to the customer and all is well. So it's not the end of the world. Don't let it stop you from listing this for sale. Don't let it stop you from creating another font or anything like that. Once you're happy with all of your spacing, it's time to export the font and try it out. 7. Cursive Fonts: Next I want to show you how I put together a cursive font that I'm working on. As I mentioned before, working with cursive is a little bit more difficult than working with a print or serif font. You can certainly do a cursive font, but it has a little bit more complexity to it, especially where the letters connect with each other. If you can imagine like an E meeting a T, they need a way to connect that's clean and smooth and that matches every single letter. It's just a lot more to think through before you plan the font. I want to show you a little bit of that process. You can get an idea of what it entails. I've created this cursive font, and if I go to the kerning page and I'll paste that coffee text into there, you can see how this is going to look. It's a really chunky bottom, thin top font. One thing I thought about as I was creating this font is how will the letters connect. That's what makes a cursive font so complex. You have all of these little connection points to consider with almost every single letter. I decided not to have every letter touching each other especially because like with my lowercase R's, I did this little loopy thing at the bottom. We don't really want that letter to meet the U, I'd rather them be separate. I decided to have some be separate, whereas others like this, H and E, those can connect to each other. This is what makes a cursive font so complex is that you have to think through every single letter combination and then do the kerning for every letter combination as well. I want to show you in Procreate how I laid out this font because some of you may want to go and create your own cursive fonts. If you look at the letters here, you can see that I made sure that each little piece that jotted out to go to the next letter is going straight out like that. It's never coming back like that. Because then when it meets another letter, you're going to see a little tail that sticks out that way. You see all these little things that jump out here and they're always going directly, whoops not that one, towards the next letter. You can see a lot of these look really similar, like this r curve, the m curve, the n curve, and that's because I just copied and pasted those curves onto each letter so that I had the exact same curve at the end of each letter. That's something that you can do to make your cursive font a little bit easier to do. Of course, you don't have to build a cursive font. It's a lot of extra work. It's somewhat complex, but you may eventually get to that point where you're ready to do that. Then you can start building that in iFont. 8. Exporting: Once you have your font all ready to be exported, all the kerning looks good. You've got all of your pieces inserted. Usually, I'll do this three or four times and then I have to come back and adjust something about my fonts. Don't feel like this is the final export and you don't have any other chances. You certainly do have plenty of time. Of course, you know, I go back in and edit fonts months later, weeks later. This is just the initial export and this will always be saved in your iPhone app. I'm going to tap the share symbol up here, and then tap configure and build font. Then you're going to get the option to insert a title and insert your name. Decide if you want it public view only or private. I always do private because I sell my fonts. I don't want anyone just downloading them. One thing I want to add here, I had to contact the iPhone team because I was having some trouble exporting some of my fonts. It was like not showing the holes in the letters like the A and the B. They were just solid. They recommended if you see that issue when you type in your title, also type minus rasterize. If you type minus rasterize, it fixes that issue. If that comes up for you, your letters are coming out solid, they don't have holes in the middle, come back and do that or just go ahead and do it and then you know you'll never have to deal with it. It doesn't actually show up in your title when you export the file so it's just signaling to the program, "Hey, you need to fix this issue." Anyway, once that's done, I'm going to name this vintage advertisement font two, because I've already created a font with this exact same name. I'll just change my name for now. Then I'm going to tap rebuild. Sometimes it takes a little time if it's a larger font. Now I need to think about where I'm going to save this. You could save it in your cloud storage. You could save it in your files app. I tend to start out with my files app. I'm going to open that files app and select on my iPad. I have a fonts folder that I've already created, but you could tap plus to create a new folder and then you could name it font folder or maybe you want a folder just for the specific font. I tend to use folders in that way. Back to iFont, it's asking me how I want to extract this file and I'm going to say, download desktop font. You could also do install iOS if you wanted to just install it on your iPad to be used in all apps. I'm going to click "Save to files" and then selecting my fonts folder, I'll click "Save". Now I've got it saved here. If I open that folder vintage advertisement font two, I can tap on that and I just imported it into Procreate. I could also import it into any other program that I wanted to work with. The next thing I do is use the font for something. Of course, you can use it for whatever your personal or commercial use is because you created this font, you can do whatever you want with it. I want to show you some things that I do with it especially selling it on Creative Market. Let's go ahead and dive into that process. 9. Selling on Creative Market: Next I want to show you my whole process for adding a new font to my Creative Market shop so that if you want to sell your font, you can jump right in and do that process. I'll be showing you how I list a new item and how I plan out my marketing images for the fonts. You may want to start thinking about what market your font would be best for and especially what key words and concepts work well with your font. That might be gritty and rough, that might be refined and loopy, that might be playful or serious. Start thinking of some key words and concepts that work well with your font. We'll try to integrate those into the advertising images. The first thing to do if you want to list your fonts for sale on Creative Market is to open a Creative Market account if you don't already have one. On the Downloads and Resources page, you can find a link to that. I'm just going to go to my Creative Market account so you can see how this is laid out. Here's my profile. I have a few fonts for sale. I only have three fonts for sale right now, and I still make a few dollars a day. Imagine if I actually filled my shop up, I could actually make some regular income. But even with a few fonts, I'm paying the coffee bill. That's something for the amount of work that I did for these fonts. One thing to think about when you list these fonts is that you have to create some artwork to display them so that people have a sense of what your font would work well for. Here's an example for my Art Nouveau font. I typed the fluids font with a vintage feel to give people an idea of what they would see. I also created these little layouts to show what I think these would look well with. These are vintage images that are in the Creative Commons. Here's a Vintage image resources page if you need some vintage images and you're not sure where to get them. I show how to create things like this in a lot of my classes. I'm not going to go into actually creating these, but you can imagine I just get this vintage image, remove the white, turn the drawing the same color, that's my color palette and add in a little bit of hand drawing and my font. This gives the buyer a sense of what style is this. It's Bohemian, it's vintage. It's relaxed. I also try to choose products that I think would look nice with my font, so pure beeswax candles was a hand feel. That all goes with the theme of my font. I love coffee, so I did a section about coffee and a little nice flower here. It's not really related to coffee, but I got and gives the viewer a sense of like natural feel, laid-back feel. I also always include an image that is the letters, numbers, and symbols so that the viewer can see everything that they'd be buying if they purchase the font. Let me just show you one other example here, road trip font. I thought this would look good as like a vintage ice cream parlor, shave cream, and then I'm showing all the letters and all the symbols that are included. You can decide here what's going to work best for your style in terms of the imagery. I went with a vintage feel, that's my style, but go with whatever works for you here. For my vintage advertisement font that I've made in this class, I've created a few different pieces of artwork. I'm going to select those so you can take a look. I've got the cover. This is the main image. I've got a few different products that I think would look cool with this font, letters, numbers, and symbols. I always do about five, but I think you can do as many as you want, so more is probably better. The image size that they request for Creative Market is 1820 by 1214. You may want to write that down. It's always available on the Creative Market site too. But so to create this canvas, I just tapped new canvas, choose pixels as my measurement and enter this exact pixel dimension. Let's go ahead and list this font on Creative Market. I'm going to select all of those, share, save it as a JPEG, save five images. I've got my images ready. I also need to have my font file ready. They do recommend zipping the file. What I do is tap select, tap on that font file in my file's app just as we exported it from iFont, tap more, and tap compress. Then you've got a zipped version of your file. Back to Creative Market. I'm going to tap the dropdown on my profile, tap add new product, select files, and then select each of my images. Once you've got all of your images in there, you can add title. I've talked about this before in my Society 6 class, but words are really important here. People are going to be searching for something specific when they go on Creative Market. Vintage, that's a good keyword. Handmade, depending on the style of your font, you may be able to stick something in there like my Art Nouveau font. That's a good searchable title. But then we also get a chance later to add tags. Just try to make your title something accurate yet searchable. I wouldn't call it like John's font. That wouldn't be very helpful for search. Choose a category dropdown here, obviously this is a font. Then on the category we get to choose a type, typically for this type of hand lettering, it's going to be display font. That means font that you use to display something, advertise something, not really something that you would like type a book with, something that's more of like a title font. I'm going to tap display because this is a display font. Then we have a little section for description. We could say, this is a vintage handmade font. Of course, we're trying to get all those keywords in there that your customers might search. This is a handmade font inspired by vintage advertisements from the 1920s or whatever you want to say here, I think the more interesting you can make it, you want people to be on this page reading about your font, being interested in your font. Take some time here to make a nice description that's both searchable for SEO purposes and also interesting, fun to read. Customize your search engine listing. I always do this. This is really important. You just tap edit title and meta description. This is what people will see when they type something in Google and find your font. You wanted to say the right stuff, you probably want to copy your product description or do something a little bit shorter. It'll show you exactly what will show up here. You want to make sure that all looks professional. Prices, I make all my fonts, two bucks to start and then I increase the price for web font and ePub. I keep my prices really low right now because I want to sell a lot of fonts and get a lot of reviews. I'm not concerned about getting a ton of money off of this right now. I'm just slowly building up my shop. You go with whatever works for you, of course. But I haven't marketed my shop, probably most of my followers don't even know I have a Creative Market shop. Right now I'm just keeping my prices low and you may want to do the same if you're just starting out. You can read about these licenses if you want to get into more detail with this, totally up to you here. We need to add our product. Drag or click to upload product. I'm going to go to browse, and I need to get into my fonts folder and go to the vintage advertisement font, the zipped version. Click on that. Under property here, this is a vector font. This is not a web font. That means it doesn't work well with websites that have to translate from different devices and work with HTML. Vector is a better option here for what we're doing. Then we need some tags. I might type vintage, handmade, rough font, handmade font. Just picture what your customer will be typing when they want to find something like this. Those tags in the description and the title should all work together to help your customers find your work. Once you have all of those sections taken care of, you can tap the little dropdown here and tap Live. I'm not going to do that because I've already posted this piece for sale on my profile and I'll show you how that looks here. If you go to my profile tap on the Vintage advertisement font, here's all of my images. Here's the title that I input, here are the prices that we put in. The customer can type words and see how it's going to play out with the font. That's one nice thing about Creative Market, it lets the customer test it. There's my little description down here and then it links to my other fonts. You can see this is an extensive process, but you can make it a little bit of money on Creative Market and especially I think if you were posting fonts all the time, I can tell you from just having a few that I make pretty regular sales and every time I post a new one, it seems to generate some interests in the old ones. I think if you were putting out a new font every month or every few months, you could really get a nice little shop going with some passive income. I hope you enjoyed watching this class and that you feel inspired to start designing your own handmade font. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad, like how to hand letter in the 70 style, how to combine lettering in Illustration and how to create ink illustrations in Procreate. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also, I share a lot of free downloads for iPad artists and designers on my website. If you'd like to get more like you got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see the font that you create after you watch this class, so please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the project section or you could tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad artists, designers, letterers, and digital planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad drawing, painting, and digital planning, and get inspired by digital creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversation, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work, check out the group through the link on the website. If you have any questions as you work through this process, please reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.