Create Fonts on Your iPad in iFont in a Few Easy Steps + 3 Free Fonts | Liz Kohler Brown | Skillshare
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Create Fonts on Your iPad in iFont in a Few Easy Steps + 3 Free Fonts

teacher avatar Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Create Fonts on Your iPad in a Few Easy Steps + 3 Free Fonts

      2:35

    • 2.

      Using Fonts and Inspiration

      4:09

    • 3.

      The Tools

      8:08

    • 4.

      Designing a Font

      11:00

    • 5.

      Building a Patterned Font

      9:01

    • 6.

      Challenging Shapes

      11:02

    • 7.

      Designing a Cursive Font

      6:15

    • 8.

      Creating Unique Display Images

      5:37

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About This Class

In this class, I'll show you how to create unique custom fonts using your iPad.  We'll cover the step by step process for creating three different styles of fonts, so that you can create any font style you can dream up.  You don’t have to have good handwriting or be good at hand lettering to create a fonts using this process!

I’ll show you:

  • easy ways to make your fonts cohesive and smooth, so you can focus on bringing your personal style to a font set.
  • how to create a simple handwriting font.
  • how to create a single patterned element, and copy it to other letters of the alphabet to create a cohesive font set
  • some interesting ways to display your font online, so if you want to offer them for sale or as a free downloads, you can create beautiful display images for your fonts.
  • how to create a cursive font by using an existing font as a template and adding your personal style to the strokes.

The amazing thing about this process is that you can start making your own fonts in only a few minutes.  You can create your own font set that you use for personal use or for your business. You could even sell your fonts, or offer them as free downloads online.  Whether you’re an artist, designer, illustrator or hobbyist, using your own fonts is a great way to add a unique, personal touch to your work.

All you need to take this class is your iPad, the iFontMaker app, and a stylus.  I’ll be using the Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus, or even your finger.

Click here to get the iFontMaker app

Click here to see the class Pinterest board

Click here to download my fonts

Click here to find Unsplash (images free for commercial use)

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Liz Kohler Brown

artist | designer | teacher | author

Teacher

Hi there!

I'm Liz Kohler Brown, an artist, designer, and teacher who loves helping creatives find their style and sell their work. Before you dive into my classes below, you might want to start with the basics in my free mini-courses:

Learn all the basics of the app Procreate so you can easily follow any of my Procreate-based Skillshare classes:

See the Procreate Foundations Mini-Course

Learn the basics of the professional surface design app Affinity Designer so you can ... See full profile

Related Skills

Design Graphic Design
Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Create Fonts on Your iPad in a Few Easy Steps + 3 Free Fonts: Hi everyone. I'm Liz. I'm an artist, illustrator and teacher. Today I want to show you how to create unique custom fonts using your iPad. I'll show you the step by step process for three different styles of fonts so that you can create any font style you dream of. You don't have to have good handwriting or be good at hand lettering to create a font. I'll show you easy ways to make your fonts cohesive and smooth so you can focus on bringing your personal style to a font set. First, we'll create a simple handwriting font. We'll go through all of the tools for building fonts and adjusting the letters. I'll show you how to use existing fonts as a template so you don't have to start from scratch. Next, we'll create a patterned block font. I'll show you how to create a single patterned element and copy it to other letters of the alphabet to create a cohesive font set. Next, we will create a cursive font by using an existing font as a template and adding your personal style to the strokes. I'll show you how to smoothly connect your letters using the adjustment tools. I'll show you some interesting ways to display your font online. If you want to offer them for sale or as free downloads, you can create a beautiful display image for your fonts. The amazing thing about this process is that you can create your own custom font in only a few minutes. If you love hand lettering or calligraphy, or if you're just getting started with lettering, you will love turning your lettering into your own custom font. It only takes a few minutes and suddenly your lettering becomes a beautiful font that you can use on your computer and your iPad. You can even sell your fonts or offer them as free downloads online. Whether you're an artist, a designer, illustrator or hobbyist, using your own fonts is a great way to add a unique personal touch to your work. All you need to take this class is your iPad, a stylus and the iPhone Maker app. This app is only a few dollars in the app store and it allows you to create an unlimited amount of fonts and share them online. Let's get started. 2. Using Fonts and Inspiration: The first thing I want to do is show you how to use the fonts that you create on your iPad. You can use these in a lot of different programs and I'll show you a couple of different options for that. You can get to the page to download my fonts through the link in the about section of the class. If you scroll down the page and then choose a font that you want to download, you can see the text. Click to download the mode class font. I'll click and hold that and then click "Open in a New Tab." Once a new tab opens, you'll see the download button. I'll click that one time and then click "Open In." Then you should see all of your apps that allow fonts to be used. You can click more to see more apps. I'm going to use the Over App. This is a free app that makes it really easy to customize your text with color and you can easily pull this into a program like procreate. You should see the option Installation Success, click "Okay". Then the press symbol will let you create a new document. You can choose a colored background or you can choose a transparent background. I'll go with transparent this time. Then you can choose a size, I'll choose the square. When you start typing, you'll see that it starts with whatever font you downloaded last, so here's the mode class font that we just downloaded. I'll click the check symbol and then click "Color" to change the color, click "Size" to increase the size. You can also click "Style" to change the spacing. If you're doing some design work, you may have some really specific spacing needs. You can also change the horizontal spacing if you've got two different lines. This app has a ton of different options for playing around with your fonts, so this is a great place to start. When thing I like to do when I get started with creating a font is look for some inspiration. You can look around you and find textures and patterns, but you can also go somewhere like Pinterest. I especially like to go to Pinterest to find inspiration for my display images. Once you create a font, it's nice to have something that displays the font online so people know what they're getting when they go to download it. I created a board with a lot of different display options. I'll put a link to this in the about section of the class. You can see there are a lot of different ways to display your font, there are so many options. You can do something that's just a picture and put some bold black text over the picture or you could do something a little more simple, maybe just a white piece of paper and combining the text and maybe some pattern on the page. You could also do a more graphic design style layout and you could easily build this in the Over App with just some flat color and then some fonts over that. This is a great way to get started when you're creating a new font. You can go to this Pinterest board for inspiration for the font itself, but also for displaying a font. For example, you may know that you want to do a hand lettering font, but you don't know what kind of style you want. If you come on here and look at 10 or 20 different styles. You may have a better idea of how you want your project to turn out. You can see there are so many different options. It's great to start out by just scanning through the options and thinking about how you could put your personal style into some of these existing fonts. Let's go ahead and get started on our first project. 3. The Tools: When you're ready to start your first font, click "IFont Maker". You'll notice that I have moved my iPad vertically. This is not an app that allows you to work horizontally. If you usually work horizontally, this might take a little bit of adjustment to get used to. When you're ready to create your first font, click "New" on the top. Then you'll see a lot of options here. On the top, you see that you can change which letter you're working on and you can do that by clicking on the letter. Or you can just click the Next Button here on the bottom or the Back Button here. You'll see all of the numbers and letters of the alphabet here, and then a lot of symbols and a lot of language options. So you can use whichever ones you want to use. You don't have to fill in every single thing. Sometimes I'll create a font and I don't do any of the symbols, whereas other times I do, it really just depends on your personal intention for this project. Another option you have here on the bottom is to change the base font that you're using as a guide. So if you click the "T" symbol here, there's a huge list of options that you can use that come with IFont, but you can also download other fonts to use in this program. Let's say for example, you have a really specific font that you want to use as your inspiration. You can go to that font and I'm going to type download fonts free for commercial use. Obviously we're not going to copy these fonts directly. We're just going to use them as inspiration. I'm going to click this first one here. This is "1001 Fonts". This is a really easy program to use because you can just scroll through, find a font you like, and click "Download". They have, I think 500 something pages. There's plenty of options. Once you find a font you'd like, you can click the "Download Button" right beside it. Then it'll open up the window with a Download option here. I'll click that one time and then I'll click "Open In". You'll notice here this is a Zip File, I need a program that'll let me unzip this before I can put it onto my iPad. I'll click "Open In" and then copy to "iZip". I use the free program iZip, but you could use any unzipping program. Once that program opens, you'll see the option, would you like to extract all the files? So I'll click "Okay". Then I can click on the "Folder" and you'll see a few different files here you want the ttf file, that's the font file. I'll click that one time and then click "Open In". Then you'll see the options here for all the programs you can use it with. I want to copy this to "IFont Maker". Then it says sample font installed successfully. The name of this font was Absinthe. I'm going to scroll up here and find it. One thing you may run into if you use one of these downloaded fonts is that it doesn't work until you shut down your iPad and turn it back on. Something about restarting your iPad completes the installation process. If you have any trouble with that, just do a quick restart and you should see the font there on your list. There it is at the top Absinthe. I'll click that one time. Then you can see there is that font on my list. Again, we wouldn't want to just copy this person directly, but you can certainly use this as inspiration and just as a guide for developing your own font style. For this one, I'm actually going to use the font Papyrus. I really like the style of this font, but I don't want to do these rough edges, I'm going to do something similar, but I'm going to change it up quite a bit. The next option we have here down at the bottom is the Brushes. If I click that one time, I can see all of the "Brush Options". The first one here is just a plain straight line. I can adjust the size over here. One thing to note is I always make a note of what size I'm using. I've noticed that if you close IFont and open it back up, sometimes these settings like the Font and the Brush Size don't get saved. I always write that down because if I get halfway through a font and then I want to come back to it. It's not easy to remember what size you had the brush on. That's one thing to keep in mind when you use this program. Just take note of everything you do as you're creating your font. Then next brush here, has a wider top and a skinnier bottom. This is almost like a kind of calligraphy style brush or a hand lettering brush. The next one is the same thing, but just a little bit more dramatic. The next one has a tapered top and bottom and the next one has a nice rough edge. This is similar, it's a semi- rough edge, but then it has a tapered bottom. You can also get straight lines. This is like straight polygon lines. But then you can get a perfectly straight line with this one. The next one here has an angled edge. Then you have some Shape Options. If you just wanted to create a circle or some other shape here, you can use that. This one's great for making sharp corners. If you had a letter that had a sharp corner, you can use square. So we've made a lot of marks here and I want to remove those so I can actually start working on my letter. We have a few options for that. The first one is this Scissor Tool down here. If I click that one time, I can click "Clear", and that'll clear everything I've written on this letter. Another option is to remove things individually. I'm going to click the "Arrow Tool" here, click on that line one time and then click "Delete". If you just want to delete one or two things, that's a great tool. If you want to delete everything, just click "Clear". We also have Step Forward and Step Back Buttons here. If you want to go back to having those lines, you can click the "Step Back Button" and I can return the ones that I did individually, or we can step forward. Another option you'll see here is the Layer Option. This Layer Option allows you to insert a photo. You can click "Photo" and then go to your "Library". Let's say you're a person who does calligraphy. If you want to turn your calligraphy into a font, this would be a great place to start. You can import each letter that you did on paper and then just use the photo as a guide. If you don't want to use these base fonts, you may want to start with a photo instead, I'm going to stick with the example option because I want to use this Papyrus Font as my base. 4. Designing a Font: The first thing I'll do is go back to the paintbrush tool here and then choose my brush. I think I want to use this brush today. I'm going to change the size here. I usually just play around with a few letters to make sure it looks exactly as I wanted to before I start building the whole alphabet. I might do like abc and then maybe some other common letters like e. What you can see here is as I'm drawing this, the program is smoothing out my lines for me. You don't have to be a master hand letter to make a font with this process, you really just need to go quickly and make sure you're meeting all of your guides here. We've got the ascender line. This will be your highest point, the baseline, your lowest point. It's okay to go beyond those because it gives your lettering a little bit of bounce on the page. There's really no rules with this. Just go with whatever fits with your personal style and play around with making some letters that you like. I'm just going to go through every letter of the alphabet here and just draw these. However, I sync works for each letter. First I'm going to clear out every single test piece that I've done by just clicking clear on each letter. Again, at this point now that I'm happy with all of my settings down here, I'm going to take note of this because if I close this program, when I open it back up, those settings may not be saved. That's just something to be aware of. I would go ahead and write down. I'm using Papyrus. I'm using the fourth brush down at 64 on the brush size. Now I'll go ahead and do this whole process with each letter. The first one I'm going to draw and let's say, I don't like how that turned out. I have a couple different options here. I can step back or step forward. I can click the move tool and move it around. Let's say this was a little bit up like this and you didn't like that little overlap, just click the move tool and move it down here, and then you can't see the overlap anymore. That's one option, another option, same tool, the Move Tool click at one time. You'll see these little bars that allow you to bend a line. This is really good for making subtle adjustments. Let's say you don't like that little overlap curve here, just use the move tool to slowly shift it over and then maybe use this tool to curve a little bit. Then we can step back, click the brush tool, and take a look at how that looks. Those are just a few things you can do down here. Also, there's the Move tool, where you can move the whole letter. So if it's all a little bit off, you can adjust that. Take your time here, play around with whatever style works for you, and we'll pick back up when I finish my font here. I've gone through and worked on all of my letters, and I'm happy with most of those, but I can still go back and change them and test the whole alphabet on our next step. But for now I'm just deciding what symbols I want to use. I'm not going to fill in all these symbols. For me personally, the star symbol is not going to be very important for my use. I'm just going to do the main ones here, but you can do this however you'd like. You may want to go through and fill in every symbol or you may not. Another thing to think about is the language options. If you want to make this available for certain languages, you may want to do, for example, the Latin accents here. let's say you want to do some of these accents, you'll go to the letter that you want to use, click the scissor and then click Paste from a. That's going to bring your a that you already made into here, and then you can just do your accent. You could at least do the Spanish options or whatever language you use or you want to use with this font, you can go through and choose those options. Once you're happy with how all of those letters look, you can start testing your font. When you're ready to do that, click the Preview bar at the top here, and then click Kernings. Kernings is the process of adjusting the spacing between each of your letters. I'm going to click Select here. Instead of looking at single letters, I like to look at words. I think it's easier for me to do the spacing when I'm looking at full words. This is really easy to adjust. You can just go to each letter. If you see a little issue, just click on that letter and shift it over. Now every time of b appears beside a y, there'll be that exact distance. This is setting the font for anyone who uses your font in the future. You just want to go through and make sure nothing really stands out as being out of place or to close or too far away. You can scroll through this whole paragraph and just make some little adjustments. You can also type in your own options. If there's something specific that you want to see written, like I might want to see art and design. Then I can see what my font looks like with those exact words. That's really the whole process for making a simple font. Once you're happy with that, you can save your font or you may want to go through and make some little adjustments. Maybe you don't like how these two lines meet each other here, I'll click my move tool, click on that line, move it in a little bit so there's a less of an overlap there and now that fixes that letter. You can see it's really easy to make these adjustments. Once you get started with this program, you can really make a font in 10 minutes, or you could spend three days making a font. It really just depends on your personal use for this project. Let's go ahead and save this font. Click the Share button in the top here and click Configure and build font. Now, you do have to be online to do this because this program moves the font as a saved file on their website. You need to be connected to the Internet so that it can download the Font onto their site. The first thing I'll do is just choose a name for my font. I named my font ivory. Then you can put your name here so that your name is always attached to this font. You can also put that in the font name. Sometimes I'll put my name in the font title itself, so that if this goes online and a lot of people are downloading it, your name isn't lost from the branding. Then you can choose if this is going to be public, private or only something that people can look at and not download. I'm going to leave this as private for now because I want to download it and put it on my own website. If you put it as public, you're offering it as a download on their website. Totally up to you how you want to do that. I also always put contact here. If you list this as public, you'd want someone to be able to contact you for commissions or for using the fonts for a special use. But if you choose private, you don't have to fill any of that in. Let's click build online. You can see here I chose a color and I chose a peach color, but you can choose black and white. That's just selecting how it's going to display on their website so it doesn't have any effect on your font itself. Then we have the options here. We can download it onto your iPad, we can download it as a desktop fond. I like to just click open here, so I can get to the download page. Then it'll automatically enter this login information for you and you can just click enter. Then we have a display page for fonts. This is private right now, no one can see this for me. I'm just using this as a storage source. Then I can click download to download it onto my iPad. I can click Open in an open it in font maker or I could open it in any other app that's on your iPad. That's this simple step for creating your first font, we'll do a slightly more complex project next, but this is a great way to get started if you're not feeling confident with making fonts, or you've really just wanted to make a handwriting font for a long time. This is a great way to get started. Let's go ahead and move on to the next project. 5. Building a Patterned Font: For this next project, I started with a little bit of inspiration rather than going straight to iFont. I found this patterned pillow in Thailand, and it has this really beautiful intricate pattern on it. I wanted to take a piece of this and create it into a font. I may end up later going through and adding a lot of these patterns to different fonts. But for now I'm going to start with just this strip here. I really liked these simple triangular shapes, and I think I'm going to add a little bit of dot patterning to each triangle. Sometimes it can help you make a really unique font if you start out not looking at the font itself, but looking for some inspiration. There are so many different textures and patterns that you could pull from. This is just one example, but you can use any pattern if you create a similar font to the one I'm making today. I'll go ahead and open iFontMaker and click "New". For this font, I'm going to start with a really thick background. I'm going to use the Avenir Next Heavy. This is a really thick font, so it's going to give me a lot of room to add my pattern. I like to start with the I because that's going to give me a really simple space to get started with my pattern. For this one, I'm going to use the very first brush on the list. I'm going to pull my brush down to a smaller size. I think I'm going to use 20. Let's see how that looks. I think that's a good size. But if you're doing a similar patterned piece, you may want to go with a slightly smaller size depending on your pattern. At this point, I would just make a note that I'm using 21 as my brush size, and I'm using the first brush and Avenir Next Heavy as my font so that if the program shuts down or I need to step away from my iPad, I have all of those settings saved somewhere. The first thing I like to do is just start with a border. I'm going to let this be a really hand drawn loose font. I could easily grab this line brush and make a straight line, but I don't want this to be a perfectly straight line, I want it to be a little bit loose. I'm going to use that first brush and let my lines be a little bit wavy, they don't have to be perfect. I can always make little adjustments by clicking the Move tool, and then just using those little dots to align this a little bit better. This is one thing I really love about this program. You don't have to draw your lines perfectly. You just have to take time to adjust them if you don't like how they look. You can really zoom in here and make sure these meet in a nice way. I don't really like when there's an obvious overlap here with the lines, so I'm just going to move this one down just a little bit so that it meets nicely with my previous line. I'm going to spend a lot of time making this I exactly as I want it because I can then go to all these other letters that have a straight bar and just copy my I onto those letters. This is probably the most important piece of my font, so I'm really going to take my time here and make this exactly as I want it to be. I'm happy with that square. It has a little bit of a loose feel, but it's not a perfect rectangle. Now I'm just going to go through and start adding my pattern. I know I'm going to do a triangular pattern for this. I'm just going to freehand it here and let this be a little bit loose. I'm going to add another small triangle in between these two. There I have a little bit of an overlap, so I'm just going to pull that line in. You can see I'm really not trying to make this perfect. It's a little bit off, but that makes it look hand-drawn. That's more like the style of the pillow that I was using as inspiration. I'm happy with that, but I want to add some little dots here. I'm going to go to my Brush tool, click the Dot, and then just add those in to the openings. Once you're happy with that piece, then you can start copying it to all the other letters that have a straight bar. I'm going to click my Scissor, click "Copy All", and then I'll just start going through my alphabet and clicking "Paste" to add that shape to any letter that has a straight up and down bar. You can see this is a huge portion of the alphabet, so doing the I really nicely, first off, saves you a lot of time. You'll notice with some of these letters that have double bars, you can grab the Move tool here, move it over to this side, and then click "Paste" again, and then you can have both sides of that H with the exact same pattern. I'm also going to copy this to some letters that don't have a perfect straight up and down because it'll be really easy for me to remove some of these parts. I just go ahead and copy this to any letter that I think I could use the whole bar or part of the bar. That's pretty much all of the letters that I can copy. I didn't do this one because I'm actually going to make my pattern horizontal on this one. I went through and did all the ones that I can definitely use, and then for all of the others, I'll have to recreate the pattern. Let's start here with the B because we've already gotten started on that one. What I would do here is just leave an open space. I'm grabbing my first brush again and making sure it's still on 21. You can see these lines don't have to be perfect because this program just smooths out, aligns for you. I don't really like exactly where that hole is, so I'm just going to move it up a little bit and down a little bit here. This is your own font. Definitely make it your own. Make changes based on whatever you think looks best with your pattern. I'll go through and fill in all of these pieces that we've already started. Now I've filled in all the letters that I was able to use that bar for. Now I need to complete the letters that I need to make a new pattern for. For this A, I'm going to create a similar pattern, but I'm going to do it sideways. It's going with my original theme, but it's just the diagonal version. 6. Challenging Shapes: This one's a little more tricky because it's a circular shape. I'm just going to make this pattern as best I can within these confines, but I probably am going to change the pattern a little bit. That's totally fine, as long as you've got similar elements that repeat throughout the font, it's going to be cohesive. It doesn't have to be an absolutely perfect pattern on every single piece. I'll just take some time to go through and mask out some triangles on the C. You can see I had to break the rules of my pattern. I was putting a small triangle on every big triangle, but for these, I changed that because they're a little bit smaller, so feel free to just play around with these options. It doesn't have to be exactly as you originally planned. I'm also going to copy this C and then go to my G and paste that, because now I can just add a little bit here to this piece to get my G without recreating that whole pattern again. I'll just go to each piece that doesn't really work with my pattern and delete it. With these circular shapes, you really just have to go super slow. They may not be perfect, but you can also use that move tool to adjust it a little bit. I'm going to copy this O.. Click "Copy All" and take that over to my Q, because I can just add this little tail to my Q. Little shortcuts like this can save you a ton of time when you're building your font. Before I draw the bottom of this T, I'm going to look around my alphabet and see if there's anywhere else I can use it. I think I can use it with my Z. But if I went ahead and drew the bottom part of this T, I wouldn't be able to use it, so that's something to think about as you draw each letter; how could you use this in another part of your alphabet? Now that I have finished drawing all of my letters, I'll just go through and adjust each one. There'll probably be a few things that I want to change or just as I'm working. I'm just going to take my time and make some little adjustments as I see necessary. Now, that I've finished making my font, I can go back to my kerning section like we did before. You can see with this one, I did in "All caps" font, so only the capital letters are going to show here. If you decide to do that, there's one important thing that you should do to make sure that whether someone uses lowercase or uppercase, this font still works. The way these fonts work is, whatever you fill in will show up with your font, but whatever you don't fill in will show up with the default font of that program. You wouldn't want someone to be typing with your font and the A is capital with your font, and then the lowercase letters are like Times New Roman. To avoid that, you can go to each capital letter, click "Copy All," and then paste it into the lowercase letter. That way if someone types lowercase A or an uppercase A, they get the same A. This is a really important step if you decide to do an all caps font. But you may want to go through and do this same process for all the lowercase ones as well. If so, then you can just go ahead and start building your lowercase version. But for me, what I would do for this particular font is just go through and copy and paste each uppercase into the lowercase slots. Once you do that, you can do the same saving process that we did for the first project to download this font, and then you can put it in the Over App like we did in the last video. Another option you can do if you go back to your preview bar here, and after you play around with your kernings, you can click "Pangram." Pangram just means every letter of the alphabet. So you can click the Pangram to see every single letter. If you click "Save Image," you can either save this as one long image like that, or you can click "GIF Animation," and that allows you to create a GIF of your font. You could do it slower if you want people to really be able to look at each letter. There's several different speeds here. You can also change your color, or you can set it to "Random" to have a different color with each letter. Once you're happy with how that GIF looks, you can click "Share." You could e-mail that to yourself, you could save it to your Dropbox. This would be a cool thing to upload to Facebook if you want to just share your font with someone. Another way to share your font would be to make an image that displays your font. I'm going to do that using the Over App. I'm going to click "Transparent," and then I'll choose a horizontal size here so I can fit my whole alphabet and click the "Check" symbol to start typing. I like to start by typing my font name at the top, and then I'll change the color to black and increase the size. Then I just want to show what each letter of the alphabet looks like. I'll change that to black, make it a little bit smaller. Now I have the font shown really clearly and the letter shown below in a smaller size. I want to space these out a little bit because it looks a little bit hard to read with this spacing. I'll click "Style," click "Space," and then first of all, do the horizontal alignment to spread the letters I've had horizontally, and then I'll click here to do vertical alignment. Then I can give them a little space on the top and bottom. Once I'm happy with that, I can click the "Share" button, save to photos. I like to use Procreate for this step, so you can add a photo background, you can add some texture. I'll click "Create Custom Size," and then I'll make the six by two inches. Let's do six by four inches. I'll click "Insert a photo," choose my image that I just created. If you're going to resize this, make sure "Magnetic" is selected. I'll put them in the center. Let's do another layer that has some texture. I'll use my gouache brush. If you want to pick up this brush and my other gouache brushes, checkout my class on gouache. I'm just going to do a few layers here to give this a little bit of a mud glass texture. I can leave this as black or I can duplicate it, make the first one invisible, and start playing around with some other colors. I could go to a pure white. I like the look of that. I might create another gouache layer to add a little bit more contrast here. You can play around with a lot of different ways to display your font here. You could put a photo on the background and overlay your font on top like we saw on the Pinterest board. Really just depends on what the style of your font is and how you want to communicate that to your viewers. Let's go ahead and call this font finished and move on to a cursive font. 7. Designing a Cursive Font: For this next font, I want to create a cursive font. The tricky thing about cursive fonts is that they need to connect to each other well. You can see, for example, with this font, these two don't connect to each other and that's an issue for using it with different programs because they don't work well together in words. Here's one that fits nicely together, and then here's one that is not yet configured to fit together. We could still adjust that one to make it fit better, but it's not yet ready to be shared and downloaded, whereas this one looks a lot better. I'll go ahead and create a new document and then choose a cursive font as my guide. The filters helped me keep my height and width correct as I make my letters. You can find a font that's already in ifont, or you can download one. You can use the same process that we used in the first project to download fonts from some web source and of course we're not going to copy this person directly. We're just going to use their font as a guide for height and width, and especially for connecting the letters. For example, with this A, I want the next letter to be able to come in right here and match up. I need to make sure all of my little tails work well with the letter after it. First I'm going to choose a size here and I'm going to go with 48 for my size and I'll go over this letter really loosely and you can see it's smooths it out for me, so I don't have to do this perfectly to make the letter look nice. So I'm keeping an eye on that tail. I really don't want that tail to curve back at all. I wanted to come straight up like this so that the next letter can meet it smoothly. If it curves at all, the next letter comes up and then you've got this weird tail that comes out from behind your second letter. That's just something I'm going to keep in mind as I create each of these letters. You can go really slow with this and make a beautiful alphabet set, or you can just play around with this process for the first time. This doesn't have to be a final piece. You could just use this as a project to experiment with font making. I'm just going to go through and quickly place some letters for the lowercase and uppercase of each letter of the alphabet. Now that I have all of those letters set, I can go to my preview, click "kernings", click "select" and choose this second option and then I can scroll down here and see that these letters are not connected. I want to adjust the letter spacing here at the bottom so that these are pretty close to perfect, but it's not going to work with every letter, so I try to just get somewhere in the middle where most letters look okay and then we can start going to individual letters and making little tiny adjustments until every letter looks right. It's really important to go through this whole list. I'm just going to go through and adjust each of these and scroll down this list and make sure every combination looks good. You can also, if you have certain words that you want to test, you can type those up here and then see what those look like on the list. This is a great way to just make sure your font looks perfect. I'm noticing here that the eye has this tiny little bump on the end. So I'm going to go back to my eye and redo it and you can see if you zoom in here, here's that little bump, and that messes up every letter that it connects to. I'm just going to click the "Move" tool, delete that, and do it again without the bump. Now when I go back to my kernings, the spacing is still preserved so I didn't lose anything by going back and adjusting that. So it's really worth your time to just take a minute and adjust any letters that don't look right on this page. The L is another one, I'm seeing that it curves back a little bit, so I would go back and redo that L. This is the part of the process that takes a little bit of time so grab some coffee and take your time, really going slow with this. I've already done this process with the same font, so I'm going to open that font that's already complete here. I've gone through and adjusted all of my kernings and made sure every letter connects exactly as I wanted to. Now I'm just going to save the font using the same process that we did before. 8. Creating Unique Display Images: I click the Download button, and now I'll click More, to find the app that I want to use, and I'm going to use over, because I want to play around with this in the over app, and create a nice image to display my font. I'll click Copy to over. Before I create my image and over, I want to know exactly what the dimensions of the image should be. Because I'm going to use a photo for this, I'm going to start by finding the photo. I'll open up my web browser and go to n/.com. N slash is a great site that has tons of free images that are free for commercial use. You can use these to display your fonts and you don't have to credit the original creator of the image. I've gone through, and just typed flatlay and search, and I found several images, that I think would be really nice to display a font. I'm looking for images that have a lot of open space, and then just a little bit some decoration, that would allow me to create some text around my font. I really like this image. It's really simple. I'm going to call my font hot cocoa, and have this little marshmallow image beside it. I'll click, download free, click and hold, and save image. Now I can open Over, and click the plus symbol, and I'll click transparent as my background, because I'm just going to put a photo on the background, and then I need to choose a size that will work well with that photo. I'm going to go with 3 by 4. Over here, I'll click image, to insert an image, and then I want to rotate this, so click rotate, and then just use this little bar on the side to get it perfectly straight up and down. Then I'm going to use my fingers to just do a little resizing and moving. Now I can start adding my font. I'll click the Check symbol, click Font. Because I just downloaded that font, it's at the very top of the list. I'm just going to type the name of my font, and then I'll change the size to be much larger, so it's really clear that this is a display for my font. I could also change the color of my text. I like how this looks with just the white. But you could change this to a brown to go with the hot cocoa theme. Then I'll click the Check symbol to set that, and then add in my alphabet. You can add your full alphabet there, or you could add some other words, because this font is set up to work well as a cursive font. I might just add some words here, that show how the letters connect to each other. I might put something like delicious down their, winter cold, things like that just to show how the font can be used. This is a really great way to communicate to someone, how to use your font and what style your font works well with. This image and the way that you lay out this page, can be really important for getting people to notice your font online. This would be a great image to share on Facebook, or your blog, or your Instagram to get people interested in your font, and maybe encouraged them to go download it and use it or purchase it, whatever your plan is for the font. I'll go ahead and call this font finished. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own fonts on your iPad. 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 create decorative and illustrative hand lettering and pro-create. Check those out on my profile, if you want to see more. Also, I share a lot of free downloads on my website, so if you want to get more downloads like the ones you got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see your font, so please share what you make. You can do that here on skill share or you can tag me on Instagram or Facebook. You could either upload your display image, so we can see all of your letters, or if you want to share your font, you could include a link, so we could download it and try it out. If you have any questions about this class, please feel free to ask. You can contact me here on skill share by replying to my discussion or you can contact me through my website. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again next time. Bye bye.