Create a Custom Character Font in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Custom Character Font in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class. Create a custom character font in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at the fundamentals of creating our own font. We're going to use Photoshop to design all the characters for our font and we're going to use an online service to actually create the font for us. But along the way, you're going to learn a lot about fonts, how they're made, and how you can create your own. Now, as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, say yes to recommending it to others, and then write just a few words about why you're enjoying this class. Those recommendations really help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. Now, if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started creating our own fonts and we're going to be using Photoshop. 2. Understanding Font Guidelines: There are few things that you need to know about before you go and create your first font. One of them is that fonts are black. Everything is just black or nothing. You don't get shades of gray and you don't get colors, everything is going to be just a black shape or a black outline. Whatever you're going to render as a font has to be able to be rendered in black and nothing else. Now, further down this site, I'm going to give you the link to it. This is a Mental Floss article, is a small diagram which I think is pretty helpful to understand what you're going to say in a few minutes. Here you'll see a series of horizontal lines around the font. The most important one is this red one. It's called the baseline. All the characters sit on the baseline. If you're going to create a font that is, for example, a handwriting font or a text font, where when you type the letters a, b, c, you see, a b, c, not pictures, then you want to be aware of what the baseline is, because if you want your letters to be nice and even at the basis, then you need to draw them or create them, so they seat on the base line. Of course, if you want your text to go up and down, then you're going to be looking at the baseline in a different way. You want your characters to be offset from the baseline and you want some to be up and some to be down for example. The median line is the one that runs across the top of their letters, so this is across the top of the letter p, and i, and n here, and that again is something you may want to line things up to. The ascender line, one of these top lines here, is the line that you use to line up tall characters like the h. There's also an l, a b, a d. They've all got these ascenders, and so if you want them to be nice and even, then you're going to take the top of the character up so it touches the ascender line. We're only going to have one of these, not two, so we're not going to separate cap height, ascender height, but some fonts software would. Then you have a descender line here, which is where long characters are going to line up. So the letter p, the letter y, perhaps the letter q, anything that extends below this line, you can have a descender line that marks out where these are going to reach down to. Again, if you want things to look neat, then you want them to all be aligned neatly on a descender line. There are a heaps more things to know about fonts, particularly when you're creating character fonts, than we're seeing here. This is just like the quickest, briefest overview. One of the things if you go into creating fonts in a little bit more detail you're going to be concerned about is the spacing between characters. We don't have a lot of guides for that in the tool that we're using, so we're not going to be involved in that at this stage, but just be aware that this is just a really quick overview. But this site, and I might find another site or two that have some handy images for you, I'll link to those in the project area. But this one will give you a brief introduction if you've never created a font before, or if you've never studied what goes to make a font, this is an introduction to the world of fonts. 3. Why create a font: Before we actually go and create our own font, let's have a look and see why you might want to even do this in the first place. Well, one of the attractions of fonts is that they're going to be accessible over all applications. Even though we're going to use Photoshop to create our font, we could use the font that we create in Microsoft Word, for example. We could use it in an Excel spreadsheet. We can use it in Photoshop and we can also use it in other applications like Illustrator. In fact, any application that supports type is going to support our font. Now fonts are scalable, they're created as vector shapes, even though we're not going to necessarily create ours from using vector shapes, the actual font file is going to contain vector shapes. They can be sized up to really large sizes very, very easily. It's also a way that we can sort some vector shapes. If you've got a really nice vector shape that you want to use over and over again, if you store it inside a font file, it's going to be accessible to you just simply by typing a character and you can get that font character, that vector shape back again. That's handy in applications like Illustrator for example, which don't make it particularly easy to store vector shapes. Now, fonts are also ridiculously easy to create. By the time you get to the end of this, if you've never made a font before, you'll probably be wondering why you haven't, because it is so easy. It's also a heap of fun. Now the other thing that you can store in fonts are custom characters. They might be your branding, so you might create a character that is your name or your initials that you can use in branding. You can also create characters when there aren't the characters that you need. If you actually need a character in a font, you can go and make it yourself. If you create handwriting fonts, then you can use these for personal correspondence or for scrapbooking or anywhere where you want to use your own handwriting. But the benefit is, of course, that you can use typed characters where every time you press a letter a, the letter a that's produced is from your own handwriting. If you create fonts, they're also salable or give-awayable. If you, for example, got a blog or you like to sell scrapbooking things online, you can sell fonts and you can obviously give them away as well. I hope I've convinced you here that there are some really good reasons for creating your own fonts. The fact that it's easy, well, that's just a bonus. 4. What we are creating: Before we get to and create our font, I just want to show you what we're actually going to do. I have the type tool here and I've got a document open in Photoshop. I'm going to go and get the font that I've been working on. Now, this is only partially created, but I do have some characters available in this font. I'm just going to make my font size 400 pixels because this is about a 600 pixel document. I'm going to click once and I'm going to type one of the characters from my font, and that is this little fox character. He is a character in a type font just as you would type A, B, C, you can type the letters of the alphabet and get these font characters that I've designed. This is a set of clouds, and I have a black cloud, and then some clouds with raindrops, and some clouds with raindrops that are white clouds. This is what we're going to be creating. We're going to be creating a font that you can use in any application. Here, it's being used in Photoshop, but it could be Illustrator or any other application. Let's just switch to Microsoft Word, which I have opened right now, I have my font selected and I can just type out some letters in my font. Right now, my font just has five characters in it. You can see it's typing like any other font in Microsoft Word. This is what we're going to do, we're going to create our own font file. It's going to be a true type font file. This is the contents of mine, so this is what it looks like when I open it, I've installed it, and then I can use it in any application at all, and you're going to do exactly the same thing. 5. Create and Download the Template: To create our font, we need a program that's going to take our drawings and convert them into a font file. So that's the technical side of it. We're going to use this site called calligrapher. Well, I think that's how it's pronounced, but I'm just going to call it that anyway. So I'm going to give you a link to that site in the class project area. Now when you come to the site, you have to sign up for it. So you'll "Click" here on Get Started free. Now, this site is one that you can pay for, but you can also get a free version of it. Everything that we're doing, we just need the free version. So you don't need to give it a credit card or anything, you can just click to get started free. What you're going to do is you're going to type in an email address and a password. Then once you've done that, the site is going to send you an email with a clickable link in it. You need to "Click" that link to be able to confirm your email address, and from there, you can get started. So when you come back to the site, you're going to login, and I'm going to do that now. This is the screen that we come to. So the first step is to create a template. So you're going to "Click" on the create a template link. In creating a template, what you need to do is to tell the website what characters you want to use. So I'm going to select Minimal English. We're going to have a look and see what we've got here. We've got the comma and the period, and all the uppercase, and all the lowercase letters, 54 characters in all. So what we're going to do is we're going to be able to create a character for the capital letter A. So we'd "Hold" down the Shift key, "Press" letter A and then something will happen, whatever we have put into our font. Now I don't want to make a really huge font, so I really only want the lowercase letters. So I'm going to "Click" on the period here, and I'm going to "Click" to delete it. But I also don't want to be asked again if I want to delete, I just want the program to assume I want to delete the things I don't want. So I'm going to "Click" Delete. Now, I'm just going to go through and delete all these uppercase characters because they require me to hold the Shift key to work with them. If you only want to make a font of five or 10 characters, then you just need five or 10 letters. So you can also remove any others that you don't want to use. So you just have a small subset of those that you do want to use. Once you've got all the letters or the characters that you want to be able to use in your font, you're going to "Click" here on download template. You're going to give the template file a name. Now, I'm just going to call it calligrapher template, and I want it to be downloaded just as a PDF file, that's fine. I want the template cells to be quite big, so I've enlarged this to the largest possible size. I do want helplines, but I don't need characters as backgrounds. I'm not actually going to use these characters, but I'll be able to know what character it is. So just going to select draw helplines, but not select characters as background, and I'll "Click" download. So the program has now created my template for me and it hasn't actually downloaded it even though we clicked download, it's actually just created it. So now I'm going to "Click" here on download your templates. It's little bit confusing, but once you've done it a few times, it's going to be apparent what's happening. So this is my template and it's a couple of pages long. If you've got lots of characters then your template is going to be even bigger than that. I'm going to "Click" on the download link, and I'm just going to save this to the location where I want to work from. So I'm going to save it in my working files area here. Here's my template name and I'll just "Click" Save. Now that I've downloaded the template, it's time to go to Photoshop and we're going to spend the next period of time in Photoshop. We're only going to come back to the website when we've actually designed the characters for our font. 6. Create a Character: I'm back now in Photoshop and I'm going to open the PDF file that we just downloaded. So I'm going to select it and just click Open. This is the import PDF dialog and it should be available in all versions of Photoshop. Here, you can select how many pages you want to bring in. So I've just got one page selected, but if you wanted to bring in more, you could Shift Click on the last page in a sequence and you would bring multiple pages in, but I'm just going to focus on page one right now. Now, if you don't have constrained proportions enabled, you will want to check this check box because otherwise you'll lose your dimensions really quickly. What we want to do is to size this image as we're bringing it in because we just have to do that inside Photoshop anyway so we may as well do it now. I'm going to set it to a width of 6,000 pixels and a height of whatever it needs to be. So Photoshop is going to adjust the height to whatever it needs to be because you've got constrained proportions enabled, and then you're just going to click Okay. It's important to work on a fairly large document here because this is going to be the document that's going to be converted into a font. So you want things to be able to be rendered at fairly good detail. Let's just zoom in here and you'll see that we've got a, b, c. These are the letters that we get to create font characters for, and we've got here the baseline and this is the main line and this is the ascenders and this is the descenders. So you can see that our font is going to be drawn in this area, but there's a sort of no-go area either side of this font box and it's not marked out. So you just want to be pretty well inside here or else your characters are going to be locked off. Let's see how we would go ahead now and create a font character to put in here. Now, I suggest that you don't work on this document. I also suggest that you open up the last panel and that you'd lock this layer down. So you're going to select it and you're going to click the lock icon. You don't want it to move. It needs to be stable. Everything that's on this sheet of paper right now needs to be saved and used later on. You also don't want to put characters in these boxes on that layer because that won't give you a chance to edit them later if you need to. So you want to work on this in a sort of sensible and considered way. The other thing I'm going to do is go to the Rectangular Marquee Tool and I'm just going to drag out an area which I think is going to be about the size of a font character and I'm just reading these values off. I've got that little indicator there as to what the size of my rectangle is. It's sort of around 1,200 by 1,450, something like that. So if I create my font characters at about 1,200 by 1,450, they're going to fit in this slot here. So let's go and do that; File, New and I'm going to create a document that's 1,200 by 1,450 and click Okay. So this is going to be my working document and white is my background color, so I'm going to press Control Backspace, that would be command delete on the Mac just to fill a background with whit, and here I can start designing my font characters. So one of the font characters that I really liked was that sort of cloud, so let's see how we would go about creating that. I added a new layer to my document and I went to the Elliptical Marquee tool and I dragged out a circle holding the Shift key as I just dragged out a fairly large circle. Then I pressed Alt backspace option delete on the Mac to fill it with black. So you can see it's separate from the background. That's really important. We're going to make a duplicate of this layer, then I'm going to select both these layers and make another duplicate and then make another one. So I have like six or seven of these circles to work with. Now I'm going to the Move tool and I have Auto select selected and show transform controls. That's really important because it's going to speed up your work. So now you can just drag either one of these circles and move it into a different position. Once you're done, you're just going to click the check mark and you can move them and drag them and resize them. If you resize them, you're going to have to click the check mark, but if you don't actually resize them in the process, then you won't even have to click the check mark. So what I want to do is draw something that looks vaguely like a cloud. Once I've done that, I'm going to select all the layers that go to make up this cloud, I'm going to right click and I'm going to choose Merge layers. I'm going to move it up a little bit further in the document. Now, this is the first of my font characters. It's going to be a black cloud. So what I'm going to do is turn off the background and I'm going to choose, Select all and then Edit, Copy or Copy Merge. That doesn't matter, both of them are going to have the same effect. So right now I have this cloud selected. I'm going back to my template here and I'm just going to click Edit, Paste and that brings my cloud in. I'm going to position it in for the letter a and I could size it up a little bit if I needed to. So there's my first font character. 7. Create an outline character: Next, we're going to look at how we could create a hollow Cloud with just an outline around it as our second character. I'm going back to my original document. I'm going to make a duplicate of my Cloud, so that I can keep the original black one, just in case I need it later on. Now, I'm going to select this layer, and I'm going to lock the pixels on the layer, so that I can fill it with the current background-color. I'll do that by holding Control and Pressing Backspace on the PC, that would be Command and Delete on the Mac. You can see we now have our white Cloud, click on the Lock Transparent pixels icon to disable that, and I'm going to click the FX icon and click Stroke because that allows me to stroke this shape. I'm going to set my stroke to something like a round about 20 or 21 pixels because that's working pretty well here. I'm going to experiment with a position that is either outside or inside. Now, it looks like I've got a dot in the middle of my Cloud here, inside probably wouldn't be a good choice ness I fill in the hole in the middle of my Cloud, but also I'm looking here and it's got little rounded edges, and I really want them to be pointier,so outside is actually the better choice for me for a couple of reasons, and I'm making sure that the fill type is set to color, and make sure that the color is set to black, and that's G and B values of zero. Having done that, I'm going to click Okay, now I need to flatten this so I can take it to the other documents. I'm just going to right-click and I'm going to choose Rasterize Layer, and that just converts this into a Raster Layer. I'm going to choose, Select All, Edit, Copy, and I'm going to my template, I'm going to choose Edit, Paste, and again, I'm just going to size it, so it looks about the right size here. We want to keep it away from the edges of this template box because I know it's going to be cut off if I get too close to the edge, so there's the second character in the font. 8. Convert a character for a font: Now some of you might have done my whimsical drawing class, or others of you might have characters that you actually want to convert into font characters. There are some tricks to doing this, so we're going to look at that now. This is my fox character and this is my layered PSD file. Now that's helpful to me to have it as a layered PSD file because that means I can get rid of the pieces that I don't want. Ultimately, what we need to end up with is a fox that is black and white because that's what a font character is. We can't have shades and we can't have colors. So I'm going to start peeling this file away. Firstly, I'm going to get rid of my hue saturation layer, which just reveals that the fox was originally this color combination. I could get rid of my background, but in actual fact, it's probably going to be better for me to fill it with white, because that's going to show me how my font character is going to look. Now I don't want the shadow under the foxes foot, so I am going to get rid of that. Let's have a look at the foxes tail, as we can see in the last pallet here, it's made up of a greenish base and a white top. Well, I'm going to the magic wand tool here, and I'm going to click on the tip of the foxes tail so we can see where this white area is right now, I'm going to the Move Tool and I want to shrink this in size a little bit. Then I want to move it up so that it is still the foxes tail, but there's going to be a line between the tip of the tail and the base of the tail, and I'm going to click the check mark here. Now because I have this area selected, I can sample the green color from the foxes tail, and I can press Alt backspace option delete on the Mac to fill this area with that color. Now, if I don't think it's quite big enough or it's not in quite the right position, I can resize it and move it into position. But this is one of the ways that you can create that dimension in your illustrations where you're using just one color. When we created this fox or when I created this fox, I was working with tones of a single color. Now, I'm just working with a single colors, so things are a level of complexity further on. I've got ears here and the ears were just a one pace. What I'm going to do is select on the inner part of the ear, and I'm going to fill it with white, control backspace or command to delete on the Mac because it's my current background-color. Now let's go and get the second ear and do the same thing to it. So we've got some dimension in the ear by just removing the darker color and just using white instead. Then we need to do something about the foxes hands here, so let's just go out and find the hands. At this point, you will realize how helpful it would have been to have properly labeled all of these layers. I'm going to control or command, click on the layer here and you can see that it's now selected, I'm actually just going to make this white. I'm going to do the same thing for the left-hand. I'm going to control click and then just fill it with white. I no longer want these effects, so I can't rely on shadow effects because you can't have shadow effects in fonts. You either have a color there or you have no color at all. Let's go to the fox's face here, that's this little place here. What I'm going to do with this is I'm going to add a color around that so am going back to the fx icon, I'm going to click Stroke. In this case we want a much smaller stroke than we have been using. So I'm just going to reduce the size of the stroke. I have preview turned on so I can see what I'm doing. Now. I'm going to put the stroke on the inside, so it's on the inside of the fox's face. And let's go and use the color that we used for the fox. I'm just going to bump that up a few extra pixels. We need to do that for this area of the fox as well. Now, the way that this was created, it was actually this overlay shape here was clipped to this shape underneath. Well, to add a stroke around this shape where it, you're going to have to select this shape here. I'm going to get rid of the drop shadow because I don't want that anymore, but I do want a strokes. Am going back to my fx icon click stroke. And now let's just go and get the color that we want to use and just increase the size of it a little bit. Again, you can work between outside or inside or center depending on which you want to use, but I'm happy with outside. So basically my fox now has been reduced to the equivalent, just black and white. There is nothing here, even though I'm working still into colors here, this is going to flatten out to black and white really nicely. I've done everything I need to do I don't actually need to go ahead and re-color the eyes at this point. What I do need to do is to turn it into black and white. To do this, I'm going to add a layer which is layer, New Adjustment Layer, and I'm going to choose black and white, and click okay. What I can do here is to drag on the sliders to make these colors black and to do that, I'm just going to drag on the cyan slider. This is what it's going to look like as a font character. I can close that down. The last thing I need to do is to actually flatten this to a single lab and I don't want to bring the white with me, so I'm just going to turn the white off right now. I'm going to target this top-most layer on the PCR hold Control, Alt, and Shift on the Mac, that would be command, option and shift. I'm going to tap the letter a, and that makes what's called a stamp layer. It's a layer that has just a flattened version of the image on it. This is all flattened down to a bitmap. I'm going to control click on the layer thumbnail. I'm going to choose Edit Copy. Am going back to my template here, and I'm going to choose edit paste. Now the fox was actually in terms of a document size here was pretty small, and so he's going to fit in this area really nicely, probably without any re-sizing at all. He is going to also become a font character. Now anytime that you want to convert something that you've already drawn into a character that you can use for a font and an a to work out how you can render it in just black and white. One of the ways that you can do that is just to outline things where you need to separate them from the background. 9. Create the font: At this point, we can go ahead and test these initial characters for our font, but we're still working with a PDF file. So we're going to start by saving this. I'll choose File, and then Save. I'm just going to give this the name calligrapher template. I'm going to note that it's part complete. It's going to be saved as a Photoshop PSD file and layers is selected. That's really important. I'll click "Save". Now we can't upload a PSD file, but we can upload a JPEG file. I'm going back again to save it a second time, "file, save as". This time I'm going to save it as a JPEG. It can still read the same file name as the PSD file, but it must be a JPEG to upload it. I'll click "Save". Then we're going to save it at maximum quality sorts quality ten, maximum large file, and just click "Okay". Before we go to the website, I'm just opening up the folder that I have these files in and I'm looking at the size of the JPEG. The JPEG file is about two megabytes. It needs to be under, I think it is eight. Eight is the maximum for the site. This is well under so it's going to upload just fine. So we're ready now to go back to the website. I'm going to start the app again. This time I'm going to click "font page", and I'm going to click "Upload template". I'm going to click "choose file", and I'm going to click on the template file that I just saved as a JPEG, so the one that's got all my characters in it, and I'll click "open." Then I'm going to click "Upload template." What's happening at this point is that the template file is being analyzed, so it's not only being uploaded, but also the characters in the font are being analyzed. Now it's recognized two of these font characters really well, and it's really made a big mess of the other one. So I'm just going to delete the one that it made a big mess of and I'm going to use these two characters. With just these two visible here, I'm going to click "add characters." These are now added to my font. Now one of the beauties of this particular site is that you can continue to build your font so you can bring in additional characters as you go. For now, let's just go ahead and build this font. I'm going to call it Helen's characters. I'm going to click "build". If I drag on the previews size slider here you can see the two font characters that was successfully created. We have a TTF version of the file and an OTF version. I'm going to click to download the TTF. You only need to download one, and TTF is just fine. I'm going to click here and I'm going to click "open." It now opens in Windows. If you're on a Mac, it's obviously going to open the way that font files open on the Mac. What you want to do is just install them on the PC, I'm just going to click the install button, and it's now being installed. Now it looks like there's lots of characters here, but really we're just looking at the two characters that we've created. They're going to be B and C, so I can just close this panel down. These are going to be saved inside the fonts so next time we come back to the program, these two characters are here, and we can add more characters should we wish to do so. Let's go back to Photoshop and let's create a brand-new file and let's test out the two characters that we just created. I'm going to fill the background of this image with white. I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to the Type tool, I'm going to go and select my new font. Here it is Helen's characters, calligrapher regular. So I'm going to click on that and working in 400 pixels, I'm just going to click once here and I'm going to press the letter B, which is my cloud, and C, which is my fox. You can see that the space between these two characters is really small. I think it's because I have a font setting here in the Character Dialog, yes, which is really tiny. I'm just going to reset it to zero, which is the normal. So here the two characters that we've successfully been able to add to the font. In the next video, we're just going to add a few more characters to the font so you can see how you can continue to add characters as you're building your font. 10. Fix Problems and add More Characters: I'm back now into the fall. It is our working Copy File, just going to shrink the cloud down a little bit and I want to add some raindrops. So I've already made a custom shape for my raindrops. So I'm going to the customs shaped tool. I have my raindrops selected, just going to work with pixels, and I have a black color selected. I'm just going to hold the Shift key as I drag out some raindrops here. If I want to move them, I can just hold the space bar down as I move them into position. Drawing custom shapes with the Shift key held down just ensures that they're constrained to their original proportions. You could draw your raindrops however you'd like to draw them. This combination of these two layers is going to be my shape. I will select both these layers, and I'm going to choose, select all and then edit copy merged. I need to choose Copy Merge, because I want to treat both these layers as if they're one. Going back to my template file, I'm going to choose Edit and Paste. Here is the shape just all on one layer. I'm just going to move it into position. I can go back and create the white version as well. For this, I'm going to need a duplicate of this layer here. I'm going to turn off my black layers, and I am going to reveal my white layers. So this one here needs just to be resized and little bit. So that's looking okay. I'm going to lock the pixels down on this raindrops lay here, and I'm going to press control backspace. That would be command to delete on the Mac to fill them with white. Now I'm going to stroke them. So again, I want to stroke them with this black color, so I must make sure that I'm using black. In this case I want to go to inside because that gives them a nice pointy tip. Need the stroke to be a little bit thicker and I'll click okay. Now I need to rasterize this. I'm going to right-click and choose rasterize layer, so that the black outlines are now no longer strokes. They're actually just baked into that layer. Going to select both these layers, select all Edit Copy Merged, go back to my working document and choose Edit, Paste. It's going to move that roughly into position. Now we had a lot of trouble with this Cloud here initially, what I'm going to do is just size that down a little bit. But the other thing that I could do is make a duplicate of it and just move it down here, and perhaps size it down quite a bit more. Just to say what I need to do to get it to work as a font character, it doesn't have to stay or font character as long as I can work out how big it needs to be, I can add whichever one I want into my font. So we've now made some changes to our template. So we're going to save it with File and then Save, and that's just saving the PSD version. That saving our work in progress. Then we're going to choose File and Save As, and we need to save the JPEG version. So we're going back to JPEG, going back to this file, we're going to select it, we're going to click save. We're going to say yes, we do want to replace it, and we're going to make sure that we are using the highest possible quality and click okay. Now we're going back to the website, and we've got our previous font here. So we're just going to do upload template and we're going to go and Upload it all over again. Now we didn't technically need to bring these two font characters in because they were already in the font. So you can always just turn off any that you don't want to bring in because you've already got them there. Of course, you just want to make sure that you don't reuse the letters b and c because they are already taken up. You've already got characters for those two letters. So you can say that we're still got problems with this one Cloud here, but I have another Cloud. So I'm just going to settle for this Cloud right now. We don't need the b and c characters because we've already got them. So essentially what we're bringing in our three characters that we didn't have before. So I'm going to click here on add characters. These are now added to the fonts, so now we've got b, c, d, e, and f. We can go ahead and build our font. I'm just going to call it exactly the same thing as I called it before. Helen's characters and I'm going to click build. Again, here are the characters in our font and we've got the ttf and ttf files. Well, I'm going to download the ttf. I'm going to click on it, and I'm going to click ''Open''. This time we have some extra characters in the font. It's already installed on this computer. I'm just going to click Install again. I'm being told that the fonts already installed and do I want to replace that? Well yes, I do, because I want to add these additional characters to it, and I can close this down. I can Photoshop, we can go ahead and just test out font, the additional characters. I'm just going to create an any size document doesn't matter what size it is. Going to go to the Type Tool, going to go and choose my font. Here it is, I'm working with 400 pixels. I'm just going to click in the document and let's try this b, c, d. I'm doing wipe those out and here's a and f. So you can see that all the characters that we have in the font are working perfectly. You would just continue to do this, go and add more characters to your template, and then go and Upload the new characters to the website so that you can create them inside your font. For me, for neatness site, because I'd like these two characters to be next door to each other. I'm actually going to delete that version. I know this version works, and so I'm just going to drag it into position. If I need to match it size-wise, it's going to resize this one. So I'll re-render these two characters later on. But you can see it's possible to continue to build up your fonts, adding more and more characters to them as you go along and just going through the exact same processes we've gone through in this class. 11. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to go ahead and to create your own font. So you're going to go and create a template, download it, and open it in Photoshop, and then create some characters in your font. You can do one or two, or you can do more if you wish. Then go and upload it all onto the website. Make sure that your font is rendered and downloaded. Then you can use it in a document and just post a copy of that document with some of your font characters in use as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned things about fonts, and creating fonts, and working in Photoshop that you didn't already know. Now, as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learn things from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to the fact that you would recommend the class to others, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 12. Bonus Video - Create a Handwriting Font: In this font's video, we're going to look at the process of creating a handwritten font. Now, this is not using a lot of Photoshop, so that it doesn't fit within the class, but it does round out a conversation about how we go and create fonts using this particular online application. So what I'm going to do is first start out with create a template, and I'm going to add some characters here. So I've chosen English numbers and punctuation. At any stage, if you do something wrong, you can just click the Delete key here and remove everything and start over. I'm going back to this selection. The problem is that this gives me 80 characters and I'm only allowed 75 if I'm using the free version of the application, and I do want to use the free version of the application. So I'm just going to pair this down by removing some characters that I think I can happily live without. It's keeping a count for me down here and I'm now down to 75 glyphs. So this is going to be my font. I'm ready now to download my templates. I'm going to click on "Download template". I can size myself, so since I'm handwriting this, I might want it to be larger or smaller. I'm going to use PDF. I'm going to draw help lines, I'm not going to use characters as background, I'm just going to click "Download". This is going to go ahead and open this in a new browser tab. Now at this point what I did was I just send it straight to my printer, so I just clicked to print it. It's a multi-page document. This one is two pages long, so I selected to print it and I made sure that I printed each page on a separate sheet of paper, because you don't want any bleeding through. This is going to be a font so you want to give yourself the best chance of getting it right. Once I've printed it out, I took to it with a pen. Now, you could use a felt tip pen, I actually use a rollerball pen, which is a step below worker rollerball, and it's about 0.5 millimeters. That gives me good black lines. You just want good black lines, not terribly thick, but they definitely do want to be forming good characters. Once I've done that, I put this in my flatbed scanner and I scan each of the pages. I scan them at 600 DPI, and I saved them as a PDF. Whatever you do out of your scanner, you want to scan them in at the largest possible size, and you don't want to be using a compressed format if you can help it. So if you've got a choice of TIFF or JPEG, choose TIFF. Then I took those documents from the scanner and I opened them in Photoshop. So let's go to Photoshop. Once I got them to Photoshop, I straighten them. So I went to the measure tool here or the ruler tool, and I dragged across a line in the document that should have been perfectly horizontal, and then I just clicked here on straightened layer. In all the versions of Photoshop once you've drawn over your line, you're going to need to do image rotation and you're just going to choose Arbitrary and that will straighten it up. Having done that, I cropped away the excess edges of the document, but you must leave in these four little boxes, because that's what the program uses to align everything. Then I re-size it. So I went to Image, Image size, and I made sure that my document was about 6,000 pixels in size. When it sized up to slide, you can see that there are a lot of artifacts in here. These are JPEG artifacts in this file that came out of my scanner. It is not a very nice scan at all. The results from the scan for this process look pretty awful. But I had two choices. I could either spend time cleaning up what I thought might be problems, or I could take this to the font program and render my font and see if I actually had the problems that I thought I had. So the second process is much, much quicker because if you don't have any problems and you just wasted us, cleaning this document up. At this point I just saved it as a pair stay far, and I saved it as a JPEG, exactly same way as we did the one that we created in Photoshop. I saved it as a very high quality JPEG file. Now there are a couple of pages because I had two pages to work with and I've done exactly the same with both. Then I went back to calligrapher. Let's go back in here. You'll go to My Fonts and you'll probably have left over the font characters from the font that you were working on. Provided you kept the JPEG files and the PST files for this, you can recreate this font at anytime. You're going to have to get rid of it to create a second font, because in the free version of their software or the free version of this online site, you can only make one font at a time. So I'm going to click this icon here and choose "Delete Font". Now you can go and upload your template. So I've got two files to upload here. We're just going to upload the first of them. Exactly the same as we did before each of these files as you upload them, are not only going to be uploaded, but also the program is going to identify the font characters or the glyphs that are actually inside this file. So this is a two-step process. It's going to take a little while to run. Once the program has recognized the glyphs, you can start having a look through it. It was at this point that I identified where my problems were and they were really minor. I had a little extra dot here and I think I had an extra dot on a letter J. But effectively that rather messy-looking scan, ended up creating pretty good font characters. So if you see problems here at this stage, I suggest you just click "Cancel", go and fix them up in the Photoshop document, we save your JPEG and re-upload it. But I'm already gone ahead and fixed those problems, so I'm just going to click to add these characters. Now we have 59 glyphs. We've just running a little bit short of our alphabet, so I'm going to go and upload the second file. This one has the rest of the characters for this font. So we're going to wait while those are uploaded and recognized. Here are the additional characters for the font, so I'm just going to click to add them. Now we have all 75 of our glyphs. At this stage, I suggest you click on "Build font", ignore all of the selections here, and just click "Build". Because you'll probably need to make some edits, so you don't need to waste time naming this file, you just want to go ahead and see what it's going to look like when it's used in text. I'm seeing a couple of problems here. My letter A is probably a little bit big and my letter N is dropped well below the baseline. So I need to clean up those problems. Also think the letter A, the uppercase A could come down just a little bit. Apart from that, I'm relatively happy with the rest of this. So I'm just going to click the X mark here to back out. I'm going to click this icon here and choose "Adjusts Baseline". Those are the characters in my fonts so I'm just going to navigate across to find the uppercase letter A, which I think was a little bit high. When your arrowing across to select letters here, the last thing you want to do is click either of these icons. They look as if they're navigation icons, but they not, they just shuffle your characters around. Be aware of that because otherwise you could end up with a really big miss. I found a letter A and I want to move it down. Well, these big arrows here move it down five percent that's a big step. The little ones here just move it down one percent. So if you need a little nudge, then perhaps one percent will be just fine. I'm just going to click across here not using these arrows, and just have a look at some of these characters. If I think some of these characters are a little big, then I can just select the character and just adjust its size down a little bit so it matches some of the other uppercase letters. You can see here that they really are a little bit oversized. If I think it's not on the baseline far enough, I can just move it down. So you may want to spend a little bit of time in this dialogue just getting things to look right. Now it's handwriting fonts, so it doesn't want to be perfect, but it may want to be just a little more perfect than it is right now. Let's go to our letter N which we decided was way too far down. I'm just going to nudge it up about three percent. Now that I'm done with that, I'm just going to click "Save Adjustments". Let's go and build the font again. Again, I'm not worried about the font file name because this is a pretty quick process, what I want to do is just check to make sure that everything looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that, so I'm just going to close that down. The only thing I do want to do is close up the font a little bit so that characters are a little bit closer together. So I'm going to click ''Edit font details', and I'm going to reduce the letter spacing a little bit down to about 95 percent and click "Save". Now I'm ready to build my font. I'm going to call it hb handwriting, I'll click "Build". The font is now built and you can see that the letters have closed up quite a bit. I like that effect a little bit better. So I'm going to download my TTF File. I'm going to click to open it. These are the characters in my font, I'm just going to click to install it. Let's return to Photoshop and let's test out our font. So I have my type tool selected here. I'm just going to type the first two characters of the font to pick it up, I've got 40 pixels selected as my font size. Now in Photoshop, there's an option here for Paste Lorem Ipsum. So what you want to do is just click to start your text and then go to Type and click this. What it does is it pastes in the text Lorem Ipsum, which is just junk text using the currently selected font. So this is not supposed to make sense, but it does give me an idea as to what my font looks like when it's in use. So I'm just going to increase the font size a little bit so that we can see it here. So that's sort of dummy text and just allows us to preview a font, and I'm pretty happy with that. So that would be how you could go ahead and create your own handwriting font using the Calligrapher website.