How to make a font with Hand Lettering Using Fontself and Adobe Illustrator - Font & Graphic Design

1. 1 Intro How to make a font with Your Own Hand Lettering using Fontself and Adobe Illustrator Fon: Hi, I'm in bracket and I'm a graphic designer and illustrator. You might know me from my YouTube channel where I teach short little graphic design tutorials for my Facebook groups where I help other designers with any graphic design problems that might come up. I've been designing fun little fonts for about four years now, and I absolutely love it today in this class, I'll show you how to take your hand-drawn font, vectorize it, and then clean it up and then create a type of bold font using font self, along with Adobe Illustrator. And you'll end up with an OTF file that you can install on any machine and then type with it like normal back when I was starting out as a designer fonts software, it was so expensive. I mean, prohibitively expensive. You can pay anywhere between 600.3 thousand depending on the font stuff where you wanted to buy. But then font self came along and their creators figured out a way to make fonts right within Illustrator and is only $40 or so. You will need to purchase the extension to take this class, but you only have to pay that once. It's not a subscription or anything like that. Now I made sure to check with Skillshare first, but they're allowing me to use a referral language has a 10% off coupon attached to it. So if you use that link, you'll be able to purchase fonts self at 10% less. 2. 2 A Few Things to Know: I wanted to mention a few things before we get started. First off, I'm not what's considered a professional font maker. I'm a graphic designer, first and foremost, in this class, I'll be showing you how to take a basic alphabet, capital letters, lowercase numbers, and a few symbols, and make those into a font if you want to become a professional font maker, your fonts should also include the full 95 characters in the basic Latin said. Most font designers add all 96 characters in Latin, one supplement. Some include a total of 516 characters. So it can take weeks or months to create a professional font. In this class is just a simplified version so that you can see how it's done. And then you could go ahead and take it one step further and add all those extra characters if you wanted to. 3. 3 Download the Exercise Files: First off, you'll want to download the exercise files so you can follow along. Now here's how to go about downloading those on Skillshare. Now these files are actually for a different class, but I just want to show you the location. You'll scroll down beneath the video and you'll click on this Projects and Resources tab right here. Then you'll see the exercise files dot zip right here. And you can just click on that. And when you do it'll come right down here. If you're on Chrome, or sometimes it comes right up here, but either way it'll end up in your downloads. I'm here on my downloads and on a Mac you can hit Option Command L. To get to that really quickly. On a PC, it's going to probably be over here in your favorite somewhere, The open your exercise files, dot zip. All you have to do on a Mac is just double-click and it'll create this little folder that has the exercise files in it on a PC, you can just right-click and choose, extract or extract all. Let's take a look at these exercise files. We have our photos and scans that I made during this class. We have topography terms, a font template that I modified. Few ways to clean up letters if you're not that familiar with Illustrator. And then this font template, which is from fonts self. And then there's also a website that can help you with quotation marks. And then another template which is similar to this one, but it already has the characters in it. 4. 4 Download and Install Fontself Maker: Now let's go to download the font self software. You can either use the 10% off link in the intro video or if you don't really want that 10% off, you can just go to fonts self.com slash store. Well, when they get the one that says font, self maker for Illustrator CC, I'm going to choose by now. Then of course, you'll fill out all your information. After you filled out everything and paid, you'll get a download link. Then when you download, it'll come right over here if you're using Chrome and sometimes in Safari, but either way, it'll go into your downloads. I'm going to choose this little carrot into Show in Finder. Then I'll right-click and choose Open With archive utility. If you're on a PC, this will be extract or Extract all. And then we can toggle this down. And there's this little PDF in here on the second page, and it tells you exactly how to install on Mac or Windows. So I'll just go through the process on Mac. I'll open up the Mac folder and then I'll double-click the DNG file. Next, I'll just double-click this icon and it'll bring up the installer will say continue, will need to agree that all their terms and I usually don't change the install location, but I'll just go ahead and hit Install. You'll have to enter your password. Then that's it. Then you can restart Illustrator. 5. 5 Typography 101: Now before we jump into making our font, Let's go over how topography works. I've opened this PDF to explain this part and is the one in your exercise files called topography line terms. And if you want, you can print this out to just refer to it as you go through the class. When you're creating a font, there are a few guidelines to pay attention to. First, we have the cap height, and this is the height of your caps or your capital letters. Every capital letter will hit this line right here. Then we have the baseline right here. This is the bottom of your capital letters and this is where most of your letters will sit. We also have the median. Now the median line is where the tops of the lowercase letters will sit. But sometimes they'll go a little bit above this line, like you see right here on the P. The space between the baseline and the median is your x-height. Next is your ascender height. That is the top of these two little lines up here. And this is for little parts like serifs extend above the cap height. By the way, serifs are these little decorative parts, this little part down here as a p, this little part of the H and the I and the n here and there on the ends of letters. This is considered a serif font. Sans serif fonts don't have those little additions. Now let's take a look at the descender height. So this line is for all the lowercase letters that dropped below the baseline like this, P or G or why? For example. Now the x-height is the space between the median and the baseline. And depending on the type of font or just the font makers preference, this can be higher or lower, and these are all just guidelines. So for example, here on this sans serif font, the x-height is actually moved up, but I wanted to start out with the same guy so you could see the difference. Wherever you decide to put your median line, that is their decision. And it can really change the way your font looks. So as I said before, these are just guidelines. Don't let them limit you. But it does really help to keep your letters so uniform. 6. 6 Using Fontself's template and a modified template: Okay, Now let's head back to Illustrator. I'm going to go ahead and open up fonts self, come up here to Window Extensions, fonts, self maker. Then it'll get this window. You can just come over here to these three little lines, the hamburger menu and choose font template. And this will make a new Illustrator file. Now this is really nice because it already has all of our guides built-in. It gives us a lot of different character sets. Basic Latin, advanced Latin. And there's the second page with a Cyrillic alphabet. And in advanced Cyrillic alphabet. And there are also lots of great tips in this document about creating fonts. Now, I've adjusted this document so that it works better for my purposes. And that's also in the exercise files. It's called font template modified. Let's go ahead and open that file. And I'll show you how to use it. I'm gonna get out of this by hitting Command W or Control W. Now the reason I made my own template instead of using the fonts self template is because when I'm done adjusting the guide, I usually just print it out like this and then I can just slide it behind the piece of paper I'm going to actually draw on, and I use layout paper. This is layout bond and it's translucent. You can kind of see through it. And I can see my guides well enough to get everything really uniform that way. Now the pieces on here on different layers, they're really easy to modify. So I'm gonna hit F7 on my keyboard to bring up my layers panel. That toggles the layers panel off and on. Here are my guides. If I hide those, you can see what happens. Let's say I wanted to change my x-height. I can just select that layer. You can see the x-height layer is right here. I can click the little circle, decide x-height, and that selects all of the x-height lines. And then I can move those down or up or whatever I wanted to do. I also wanted this to be a little bit bigger, but I wanted to still be able to print on it and a half by 11, I modified it that way. It'll be easier to draw the shapes of the letters. If you wanted a different style of font, you could also do that. Onkeydown my selection tool by hitting V and then I'm just going to click a letter, and that takes us to the characters panel. Now I can click the little circle decides that. And it'll highlight all my characters. And then I could just choose a different font if I wanted to. Having a different font there can help you see, if you're gonna make, for example, a serif font. You could see where serifs and normally go. When I'm using this, I always choose slightly see-through paper like layout bond. But if you wanted to go with tracing paper, that would also work too. You would just need to put something white behind it when scanning or taking a photo. 7. 7 Drawing your illustrations: Now it's time to actually draw the characters for our font. There are a few ways to do this. You can do it on paper like this that I showed you earlier. You can do it on an iPad and procreate using an Apple pencil. And you can also just draw the shapes in Illustrator. Now I know that not everyone has an iPad. So today I'm going to show you the way with just drawing on the paper. I'm going to give you a few tips and tricks on how to do that. Then will be vectorizing the fight and then using font self to space it correctly. And then finally make the font. I'm going to add my guide behind my paper so that I just have a template for my letters to make them uniform. I like to use either a Sharpie or this Tombow pen. This Tombow pen, the infant has two sides. There's a small end and a large and that looks like a brush, but is actually like a felt tip. I'm gonna use that felt tip to draw. I'm gonna pay attention most who my baseline and my cap height. As I'm drawing, I tried to keep everything really smooth. Although if you're not used to practicing calligraphy, you're probably going to have at shaky hand like I do. And that's okay. I actually liked the rough look. I think it can add interest to a font. I tried to keep the width, most of my letters the same, although you're going to have wider letters that you have to kind of very like the W or the M. You'll notice that parts of my letters are a little thicker. Downstroke usually it will be thicker than across line. While I'm drawing, I'm trying to keep that thickness consistent across all my letters. Don't worry too much about making mistakes because if you mess up, we can always fix in Illustrator. Just don't worry about that too much. Now on my lower-case letters, I'll need to pay attention to the x-height. Now we'll move on to numbers. The numbers will have the same height as the capital letters. And I'm also trying to keep the width really similar here too. Now we'll move on to punctuation. These are a little hard to see, so I'm having to check underneath to see the character. Kinda go back over some parts of you think it's not going to be smooth enough. I think we're ready to scan these. 8. 8 Getting your images into digital format: There are two ways to get your letters into digital format. And the first one is with a scanner. And this is the way that I really recommend. But if you don't have a scanner, you can also use your phone. All right. Now this scanner is an HP desk jet 2554, and I'm just going to open it and place my sketch in there. Then I'm going to head back to my computer, and now I'm here in Photoshop. You can either do this in Photoshop or with the scanning software that came with your scanner. First, I'll show you the Photoshop way. I'll just come up here to File Import and images from device. At first it'll do an overview scan, and then I'll have this selection area. So I usually start out by hitting Command a or Control a to just select the whole thing. And then I can pull these handles up to just set a focus point on what to scan. I'm gonna put this at black and white, 300 DPI. And then JPEG here. I've got a scanning to the desktop. You can change that though if you want. I'll scan and it'll also come up in Photoshop, which this is a very clean scan, so we don't really need to do anything to it. But one thing I like to do to get rid of some of the grays and that kind of thing is hit Command L or Control L to bring up my levels. And then I'll pull in this slide are a little bit and I'll bring the middle slider over the opposite way. And that kind of gets rid of that white. And we'll say, Okay, then I'll just save with Command S or Control S. Then I'll repeat that process for the rest of the characters. Now if you need to use your scanning software, you can search your computer for your scanners name. Mine is actually called HP desktop 2540 series two. This is the scanning software and it's telling me that it's in use by another application which is Photoshop. So I'm going to quit this. Now everyone's scanning software is going to look different. But really the main things you want to focus on are you on a black and white 300 DPI and you on JPEG. It's very similar to Photoshop. I'm gonna hit Command a or Control a to select everything and then use these little handles and bring those in. And this is going to save it into pictures. I'm also going to put this on desktop and we'll scan. Now let's show you how to take pictures with your phone. If you don't have a scanner, makes sure that your cameras parallel to the table. Then I like to zoom in pretty close and just get sections of letters. That way you don't have to deal with the distortion if you try to get all the characters and one photo. And I'll add some of my photos to the exercise files so you can see what I'm getting in the frame. Now once you're done with taking photos, you can either email those to yourself or if you have an iPhone and a Mac, you can use AirDrop and then it just sends it using Bluetooth straight to your computer. 9. 9 Setting up your workspace: Okay, so now I'm going to show you how to set up your Illustrator workspace so that it matches mine. If you're pretty comfortable with Illustrator and you like where things are located, you can just completely skip this part. But if you're not so familiar with Illustrator, it might be a good idea to set yours up so that it matches mine. Alright, let's go ahead and open Illustrator. We'll come over here to create new. Then I'm going to choose Print and then letter. And we'll come over here to create so that we can get the same starting point. I'll come up here to Window and then workspace, and then we'll choose Essentials Classic. Then go ahead and come up to Window Workspace again, and then Reset Essentials Classic. Now your workspace should look a lot like mine, except it might be the dark settings. If you want to use the light setting like me, you can come out to Illustrator preferences. And then General, if you're on a Windows system, this will probably be under Edit, Edit Preferences. Now I'll come down here to the user interface and here's your brightness. I know a lot of people like the dark setting and that's totally fine. There's no difference. This is just my preference to make it light. Now we'll come down and press OK. Ok, So now we all have a similar look for our Illustrator interface. I'm gonna show you how to customize this. You can get to the panels, you need a little easier. These tools over here are your toolbar. And I like to pull these out so that they sit right here. It gives me a little extra space at the bottom. Do that. You just grabbed the top right up here and then just pull like this. Then I just put them back in the same place. Up here is your control panel. Now if you're not seeing your control panel for some reason during the lesson, you'll want to come up here to Window control right here. And all of these panels over here are also available in window. First, I will open this little fly out. So I'm gonna click these two little arrows to expand the panels. First you'll see color and color guide, and I like these right up here in the upper right. I'm going to click in this blank area over here to just pull this out like this. And then I'll click on this hob and set it right up there. You can see when you hover over different parts that you'll get some blue areas. And that shows you that it's going to snap in-between those places. We went to come up here to the very top, you'll see you get a rectangle around everything. But if you move up a little higher, you'll get just a line. When will we see that line will just release that way. It'll snap up to the upper right. Okay, next, I also want my swatches to be over here. I'm going to click in the blank area, pull it out. Then I'll click on this top here, hover under color until I get the blue bar and then just release. Now for this next set, the stroke gradient and transparency. I actually went transparency to be separate. I'm going to click right on the word and pull this one out and that'll separate it from its little group. Then I'll get right on the top and pull it right underneath swatches like this. I want my art boards to be right underneath transparency. I need to pull it out of this group so I'll get right on the word itself and they just click and drag. Come up here to the top and hover right underneath transparency, underneath art boards. I like transparency align and Pathfinder. I'm going to come up here to Window and I can choose any one of those. I'm going to choose a line right here. It'll open this little group that has all three of them in it. I want that whole group underneath art boards. I'll come up here to the very top. I'll click and then hover until I get the line and release. Now, I don't use properties are libraries very much. I'm going to get in this area of the group and just pull it out. And then I'll just click on the X to get rid of these. If you want to bring them back, you can, of course, just go to Window and find them here. Properties is right here. Okay, so the right side of our panel is all set up the way I want. Now, I'm going to work on the left side. I like my character and paragraph to be up here, so I'm going to go to Window. And then these are a little hidden. You'll have to go to Type and then you can just choose character or paragraph. And it'll open that set. I'll click up here on the very top, and then I'll hover at the top of this column. Stroke is already exactly where I want it so that it's perfect. And then I'm going to open my links. I'll go to Window and links. These, I'll put it right underneath my stroke. Next, I want to separate my appearance and graphic styles. I'll go ahead and click on graphic styles and pull it out. And then I'm just going to put it right above the appearance. Now, I have layers and Asset Export down here, and I don't want either one of those to be in the column. So I'll click here and just drag it out, and then I'll click the little X. Now I do use layers sometimes, but not that often. When I need those, I just hit F7 on my keyboard and it brings them up and then I can hit F7 to toggle them off. My Illustrator setup is exactly how I want it. So now I need to save my workspace. We'll go to Window workspace, and I'll choose a new workspace. I'll call my new workspace a. Now I already have a workspace named a. I'm just going to override it by hitting okay. Now as you're working, you might accidentally pull some things out like this. You might be moving things around. And when that happens, it's hard to remember where they were. And that's why workspaces are so great. To reset everything, we can just come up to Window Workspace and then choose our workspace. Then we can go back to workspace and reset our workspace. And I'll put everything exactly back where it was. The other thing is a Zoom settings. When I hit Z on my keyboard, the way I like to zoom is to draw a box around whatever I went to see better. Let's say it's this right here. That'll fill my screen then. But the normal way that everyone else likes to Zoom is with the animated zoom. To get to that you can hit Command K or control K on your keyboard, and that'll bring up your preferences. Another way to get to that is go to Illustrator preferences on a Mac or edit. And it'll be, I think down here somewhere on a PC. Once you're in preferences, you can come down here to the performance. And you can see that animated zoom on my system has been unchecked. So if you want your Illustrator to act like mine, you can also uncheck yours, but if you'd like the animated zoom, you can check it. So here's what the difference is. If I'm on my zoom tool and I want to see maybe the letter C a little better. I click on the sea and zoom in by dragging to the right, or I drag to the left to zoom out. 10. 10 Vectorizing and cleaning up images: Now we need to get our images into Illustrator. So I'm gonna go ahead and create new. I'll come up here to print, to use Letter, and then I'll go to Create, and now we'll go to File Place. Then I'll navigate to where my images are saved. I'm going to use the scans for this. I'm going to place this. Then I'll just click once. That'll put it in at full size. Now, I'm going to need to rotate this so I'll get just outside a corner like this hold Shift and then it'll snap into place. And I think I'm just going to rotate it so that these letters are straight. I'll hit Command or Control R to get my rulers up and I'm going to pull down a guide so I can get those a little straighter. I'm going to click on my image and rotate it again a little bit. Next we're going to image trace this. So I'll click on this button right up here at this hot. Now if you're not seeing this bar That's right under Window control right here. This toggles it off and on. I'm going to click that. And it's going to give us a warning about a large image. That's okay, and it'll take a second. Now I'm gonna come up here and click on this button, which will bring up the image trace panel. And let's come down here to threshold. I'm going to increase the threshold a little bit because I'm losing a lot of my dark areas. I'm just going to keep bringing it over a little more until I run into a problem like this. So that's part of that light leak that happened earlier. But this is looking at, I've toggled down my advanced carrot, and I'm just going to make the noise about 50 pixels. You can play around with this and see how your letters look when you increase the noise. And we're also going to come down here and ignore white. Okay, and this is looking pretty good. Now I'm going to expand. Now we did this backwards. I started with k, So I'm gonna move this off to the side. And I'm just going to go ahead and go through that same process and bring my other letters in. I'm gonna go to File place. I'll choose my other scan, then place. I'll click once and I'll image trace. We'll say, Okay, now I'm going to rotate this one. Hold shift. And it looks like these are pretty straight already. I'm going to leave my settings the way they were for my other one. I'm going to choose Ignore White. And then we'll expand this. Alright, I've got one more document, so go to File, Place, open scan to up at this one over here. I'll do the same process. We have all our letters, we have some duplicates as some letters. And that's okay. We can actually just pick which one we like better because they'll most likely be slightly different. Okay, So I'm going to save this file, save as I'm going to call this letters original. I'm just going to put this on my desktop and then save. And we'll say, Okay, now I'm going to get back in my Exercise Files and I'll pull up that font template modified by hitting Command or Control O on my keyboard. Now I'm going to put each letter where it belongs in this template. I'll close out of my Image Trace dialog box, and then I'm going to open my layers with F7. I want to make sure to lock all the layers except for your artwork here. So I'll click and drag across all those. It's okay if you overwrite this document because you can always come back out to the Skillshare class and read, download a fresh copy. I'm gonna get on my selection tool by hitting V on my keyboard, I'll select this part of the font. And then I'll hold Shift and select the other part of the font. I'll copy those with command C or control C. Then I'll come over here to the font template and paste with Command V or Control V. Now we have all of our letters in here. I'm going to zoom in by hitting Z on my keyboard and just click and drag. And now I need to get each letter separate. I'm going to use my group selection tool and that's right here. And I have a keyboard shortcut setup to easily jump to this as the letter G. If you want to set yours up, you can come up here to edit keyboard shortcuts. And then you can just click right here under shortcut and hit the letter G and say, okay, it does, I think it does replace somebody who may be at your gradient, but if you don't like that, you can choose a different letter here instead. I'll say, okay, with my group selection tool, I'm going to draw a box around the a. I'll cut with Command X or Control X. I'll paste in front with Command F or Control F. And then I'll group this with Command G or Control G. Then I'll hit V to get my selection tool. And I'm gonna put it right where it belongs on the a. And you'll want to do this same process and put all of the other letters where they go. So we'll cut paste in front and then I'll group this with Command G or Control G. First I'm going to delete these two little marks, and then I'll move this into place. So that'll be the same process for everything. And I'm just going to speed up the video so you don't have to wait for me to do that. And actually what I'm doing is I'm cutting pasting in front and then grouping and hiding with Command three. And that's just to get them out of the way. I'll adjust them onto their positions here in a moment. If you mess up, you can always hit Command Z or Control Z to go back a step or a few steps by hitting it a few times. Now all of my other letters are hidden, so I'm gonna unhide with Object, Show All, bring everything back. I'll hit F7 to get out of my layers. And then I'm going to move these with my selection tool right over here. And I'll move my j over a little bit. I'll get it exactly where I want it. And the A2, I'm gonna select that whole row and I'll come down here to my align palette. And I went to choose this vertical align center. I'll click that. And I'm also going to choose Distribute Spacing so they're equally spaced apart. To get the Distribute Spacing up, you can just double-click a line a few times until you get this view. Sometimes this is hidden. I just tried to kind of visually center them in their rectangles. Now you probably noticed that I've overshot the cap height on some of these, but that's okay. It's really just a guide and you can always adjust each letter if you want to go that route. For example, these letters are all little too tall. So I'm gonna select all of them and just get on this center handle and bring them down like this. Now if you're not seeing that center handle, you can come up here to View and Show Bounding Box right here. Now you've probably noticed that my letters are pretty rough and I'll show you a few ways here in a moment to clean them up and keep in mind, you can use your pen tool to actually draw them using these letters as a guide. You can also use this part of the Align panel, the Horizontal Distribute Center. And that can give you some different results that might work a little better for you. Okay, so now we have all our characters in, and now I want to go through and clean these F a little bit. So I'm gonna hit F7 on my keyboard. Now I'm going to hide all the guides, so we're just left with the characters themselves. I'll hit Z and then I'll draw a box around this one to zoom in. So if we click this with our selection tool and then hit a, it'll show us all the points in the letter. I'm going to hit P and then minus, hitting P and then minus will bring you to your Delete Anchor Point tool right over here. And I'm going to start deleting a few points here and there that look a little messy to me. Now I'm gonna zoom in a little more by hitting Z and drawing a box. And now we're gonna get on my smooth tool, that is Shift S. And it'll bring you to this tool right over here, which is underneath your pencil tool. And I'm just going to go over a few of the areas and smooth them out. Now it might add some anchor points back in, but I think those help with smoothness. And if you don't like them, you can always delete them. Now we'll hit a this point up here. I think I want to just move it over so I'll hit a on my keyboard to get to my direct selection tool. And then I'm going to click right on the anchor point and just bring it over. And I'll move the handle down a little bit and over, I want to move the other anchor point away. A lot of times when you use Image Trace, you'll notice you get some rounded corners like this and you really want them to be sharp corners. To fix that you can grab an anchor point using a tool, click and drag and move it wherever you want it maybe right here. Then click the other anchor point that is causing that corner and overlap it. And when I do that, I like to keep this line looking like a straight line. So if I move it over here, obviously that wouldn't make sense. So I'll move it to where it would line up with the other line. And that gives us this little bubble. To fix that, I'll come over here to Pathfinder and all unite, and that gets rid of it. Let's move on to the next letter. So I'll select it with my V tool, this tool right up here, my selection tool. Then I'm going to hit Shift S and just start cleaning up these areas a little bit, smoothing them out. I'm going to delete some anchor points with p minus, like this one. And let's see, I'm using my a tool to select right along the line so that I can see the anchor points. Now if you're right on an anchor point, you can also use your pen tool. You can hit P to get to that one. Now this part looks really thick, so I'm going to hit a on my keyboard and I'm going to click right on the line in here, this inner line. Now I can grab an anchor point and just move it over a little bit. And the handles, you can grab those and move those to just be careful handles are one of the more challenging things about illustrator. So they take a little bit of getting used to. We'll just move this one down here. Maybe I'll delete this one and p minus. And this looks pretty good. I'm going to go through my whole font and just smooth things out with Shift S. Delete anchor points that don't really needs to be there, like this one. Now if you have something like this happen, you can use your handles, but you have to get on your a tool to do that. So I hit a to get to my direct selection tool and then I can use my handle. And just pull it back out. So it looks right. Now there's one other tool that I like to use, and that's my pencil tool. First, you'll need to select your character. And then you can hit N on your keyboard. And you can actually redraw a line this way. First. Before you do that though, double-click on your pen tool and make sure you're on smooth all the way over here. Then I can start going this way. You have to start right on that line and come on down here and end up exactly on the same line going the same direction. See how that smooth that out. And now I'm going to try it right here. You can hold Shift and get a straight line that way. Now I'm gonna get my direct selection. I'll make sure this inner part is selected and then I'll do the same thing. I'll hit N on my keyboard. I'm going to click and I'll hold Shift to come up here like this. And I'll let off shift and then come over like this. If you wanted to do straight lines as a pretty good way to do it. Now I'm going to hit Shift S to get back on my smooth tool. And I'll just smooth out this part of the D. I'll get back on my selection tool, re-select, hit Shift S, and then smooth this part of the D out to I'm hitting command minus or Control minus to zoom out. Now if your character comes to a point and you don't want it to. If you use your direct selection tool, the a tool to select that point, then you can use this little round corner widget. You can click on this little white dot with a blue interior and just pull that into round that part. Now, I'd like this to be a corner point. I can see here that it has handles. So what I can do to fix that is hit Shift C. Shifts C will bring us to the anchor point tool. When I click my corner point, it gets rid of those handles and it straightens everything out. So to get sharp corners with no handles, use the anchor point tool. If you're a letter is kind of leaning one way or the other, you can hit E on your keyboard to get to your free transform tool right here, then you can get on a middle handle and just drag it over like this. And that way you can straighten it up so that it matches your other letters. You'll probably notice I'm skipping around from letter to letter. That's because I'm noticing the same problems on some of them. You might notice that one part of your letter like this doesn't line up kind of where it should be. So to fix that, I'm going to get all my direct selection tool. And I'm just going to click and drag this up. And then I can just round this part out. If you're having trouble with an anchor point, it might be that two anchor points are right on top of each other. So in that case, use your p minus to delete one. You can always undo if it's not the result you want. You can also select an anchor point with your a tool, the direct selection, and then use your arrows to just nudge it over. And if it's going too far, hit Command K or control K and just change your keyboard increment. I've got mindset at 0.1 points right now, But usually I keep this at ten times this size, so 1. You might need to adjust that. I'm going to go ahead and edit all the rest of these characters. And I want to do that offline because it will take some time to get it right. 11. 11 Arranging letters for Fontself: All right, so we've got all of our letters cleaned up now. Now the wave font itself works is you need to get all of your uppercase letters in one line and then all of your lowercase letters in a line also. So to do this, I'm gonna go ahead and open up that font self extension again. I find it easier to work with letters like this, and that's why I started out here. But to get them into a row, I just think that template works a little better. So we'll go to Window Extensions, font self maker. Then I'll come over here to the hamburger menu and choose fonts template. And then I'll go ahead and close fonts self maker. Okay, so now I'm gonna go back to my letters. I'm going to select all with Command a or Control a. If I hit F7 to get my layers up, you can see that all of my other layers are locked. So the only thing is I'm selecting right now are my characters. Everything else is locked. Okay, so I'll copy those with command C or control C. I'll come over to my template. I'm going to hit F7 to get rid of the layers again. And I'll just zoom in here and then I'll paste. Okay, and these are quite a bit bigger. I'm going to hit S on my keyboard and that will bring me to the scale tool. And I'm gonna make these 50% of their current size. We'll say, okay, I'm going to position them where they should go. On the template from the exercise files. These aren't guides, so hopefully these won't be too light on your screen to be able to see what's going on. I'm going to position the a and I've got all the letters selected. So I'm going to position the a up here, which is the cap height. And I'll zoom out with Command minus or Control minus. And you can kind of see how far off you are from where the j should land. So I'm going to watch this, get on a corner, hold shift and just resize everything until those letters look pretty good. Now we can just position them where they should go. I'm going to pull these out of the way. And I'll just select these. I'm using my V tool or my selection tool to select the characters. I'm not being really careful right now about where I put them. I'm going to go in and adjust them later. So now I've got all 26 uppercase characters, kind of where they should go, and all 26 lowercase. And now I'll do my numbers. Now with the character set in my own template. I don't draw some of these characters, so some of them are going to be missing, which is fine. Sometimes I like to use my whole screen to view was on my art board. So to do that quickly, I want to hit the Tab key and that gets rid of all of these palettes. If you want to bring them all back, you can just hit tab again. So I'm gonna zoom in here by hitting Z on my keyboard. On these I messed up. I'm just going to move these over. Now, this little carrot thing is not in the basic Latin character. Set this down here in advance, but I'm going to put it right here next to my dollar symbol. Okay, so now we can zoom in and adjust these in their area. We want to make sure the cap height and baseline are the same. I'll hit tab to get my Align panel back. When I'm doing this, I use the character that already exists there to figure out where I should put these. For example, on this aux. This is not centered in this space. We have a tiny amount of space right here, and we have a wide amount of space here, but the OH, part is centered. So that's why it's nice to have that existing character back there. You can see where the O's placement should be. I'll speed up the video. So this isn't quite so time-consuming. These are a little moved up, so I'll move them back down and center them in their areas. I'm going to hold Shift and deselect everything with an ascender. Now I'll use my Align panel to vertically align these at the top. This to go right up to this line right here. I'll hide all those with Command Z or Control three. Now let's select everything that's left. And I'll do the same thing. We'll do Vertical Align Top. These should be aligned all at this cap height line. Okay, now I'm gonna go to Object and Show All and that will unhide are bringing back all the characters we had before with Command Z or Control Z. Now I think I must have missed this when I was fixing all of my letters, but this f is a little too tall, so I moved it to the baseline and now I will just adjust the top. You can see that it's taller than the cap height. I want the top of this to be right here. So to do that, I'll hit a on my keyboard. I'm just going to select all these points up here, click one and then pull them down. And of course I'll have to fix this part right here. Now we'll go ahead and save my document. I'll hit Shift Command S or Shift Control S on a PC. I'm just going to put this on my desktop. And I'll call it font template. And we'll save. I'll say, okay, now I'll continue on with the process of getting everything where it should go. Moving on to punctuation. I'll move these over here. My dollar sign goes here. I'm okay with putting this in right here. And the equals is right here. Okay, So now we're ready to open font self and start creating our font. 12. 12 Importing Characters into Fontself: Okay, so let's open font self. I'll come up here to Window Extensions, fonts, self maker. And now we're ready to drop our letters and characters onto this little screen. I'm gonna make this a little bit smaller and move it out of the way. Before we do this, we need to make sure that there are exactly 26 letters here in the uppercase alphabet. If you have any little paths that are not part of a letter, it's going to count that as a letter. And when you drag it onto the font self maker, you won't have the option to drop it on uppercase like this. And that's because it needs 26 letters, but it looks like mine are fine. So I'm just going to drop them here on a to Z. It'll take fonts, self maker, a little bit of time to get them in there. But once you do, they should already be matched up from a to Z as long as your letters are in the right order. Now I'm going to select my lower-case letters and do the same. I'll just drop them onto lower-case alphabet Twenty-six letters. Then I'm going to run through and make sure that they all have the right character assigned and they look good. Now we'll get 0 through nine. I'll click and drag those on. We'll put those right on numbers and those are looking good. Now I'm going to select all of my punctuation that are together on one line. You can only do one line at a time. So I'm gonna grab these and pull these on. And now my only option is this, any character batch. I'll drop it on there. Now when I do this with my punctuation elements, I'm getting this warning and I think this might be a font self issue. I'm going to go ahead and reach out to the maker to see if there's something I'm doing wrong here because I have it set up exactly like the template. So I'm going to find that out there generally responsive. I reached out to them before, but anyway, we're gonna go ahead and import anyway. Even though I have them in the right place over here on my template, all of these are just a little bit low. So I have to manually move them up like this. Then I'll finally get the last group of characters is the same thing. Now this seemed to do. All right. Now you probably noticed that we don't have a character down here, so I'm just going to go through and put the right keystroke for each of these. So that's a comma, I've got a colon. You can just tab between them. I'm going to skip these different styles of punctuation marks for the moment, and I'll come back to those. Now we have these six punctuation marks left. Now, open ear quotation marks and apostrophe font, self maker Help Center website in your exercise files. That'll bring us to this article. Right here are what we need to use to copy and paste into those areas. So I'm going to copy this first character. Then I'll go back to Illustrator. And this is this one. So I'm going to paste this in here. I'll come back to the article and get the next one and paste that went in. And then we've got the single angled quotation marks and the double angled quotation marks. And depending on what program you're using, sometimes the program will choose these and sometimes it'll choose the straight up and down quotations. So it really does matter to put these in. I'm gonna go ahead and look back through and just double-check that each character has the right keystroke below it, okay, and they're looking pretty good. Now, fonts self maker lets you automatically adjust the spacing and the kerning in your font and just one-click. This is a good starting point in my opinion, but it's not perfect. I still like to make fine adjustments afterwards to do that, all we have to do is click on this button that says smart on it. Then I'll choose Smart space and Kern. 13. 13 Adjusting Character Spacing: I'm gonna make my window a little bigger here. Now you can manually adjust the spacing by dragging this line so that it moves closer to the character on the left of it. But I don't like to do it here because it's hard to know how it looks next to the other letters. So I'm gonna come in here to Advanced. This gives us the ability to space and Kern with a lot of examples so we can see exactly what characters need work. So the difference between spacing and kerning is when you adjust your spacing and by the way, were on spacing right now, you're basically defining the amount of whitespace on a character's left and right sides. This whitespace is called side bearing. It's different based on the shape of the letter. And a good way to start out with spacing is to adjust your straight letters, which would be your capitals that have a straight line on the right or the left. So let's look at the capital letters. I'll choose a B capitals up here. This would be the letters like H in em, one side of the l, one side of the B, just everything that has a bar on one side. So when you're adjusting your spacing, you'll want to start out with those letters like H or written. Then you'll continue with curved letters. That would be like an O and then move on to letter. So with more abstract shapes like TX, v, y, or z, now the smart spacing actually did a pretty good job. I can see that my OH, because it has this little thing on the edge, the space to the right of it needs to be reduced a little. I'm gonna come down here to the o, and I'll get over here to the right side. I'm going to use my arrow keys and shift to move that quite a bit. That'll actually connect a little bit to the next letter. And that's okay. Maybe even a little more. Okay, That looks good. It looks like my L and Z, you need a little more space. They're almost touching this a and the y. So I'm gonna go down here to my z and increase the right side and also the left side a little bit, maybe not quite so much on the right side. Let's take a look at the uppercase and lowercase and see how those look. It looks like my Q has a little too much space to the right. So I'll click in that right box and I'm just going to hold Shift and decrease the size a little bit. Now if you want to increase all the leather space at once, you can click on letter space plus right here. You can see it jump over a little bit. You can also increase or decrease the space between lines, and that's the line space right here. Let's add a little bit. And if you don't like the amount of space between words, for example, the space bar. You can also adjust that. And you don't need to adjust the left and right here. You can just adjust this middle. This is the size of the space. If you decrease it, you'll get this result or increase to get something like this. When you're doing this, you'll want to go through and change your spacing, clicking all five of these buttons to make sure the spacing is right on all of them. So here's lowercase. We got uppercase, upper and lower, then how the numbers work together, and then characters that are not included in any of the others. So I'm pretty happy with the spacing. 14. 14 Adjusting Kerning: Let's switch over to kerning. Now when you use kerning the differences, you're looking at specific pairs of fonts. So an example is how ONJ go together when they're right next to each other like this. So for example, if I want to change the kerning between o and j, I can just type o up here. And then finally ONJ. Then decrease the number between them. And I'll hold Shift to decrease it by quite a bit. I'm just using my up and down arrows with my Shift key. Once I've clicked in this area right here, I'll switch over to capital letters. Now I can also type up here. If I wanted to see how the word have looks, then this would show me. And then if I wanted to move in the space between the a and the v a little bit. I can just type a here, choose the a and the v and then decrease the current in between them. The most common uppercase letters that need Kearney, our AV, AZT and VA. Kerning is usually just used for fine tuning. And if you want to correct all of the pair combinations, of course I could take quite awhile, days or weeks. I usually just fix the most obvious ones. You can definitely spend as much time on kerning as you like. 15. 15 Saving and exporting the font: Okay, so let's go back to the home. Now it's time to save and export our font. I'll come up here to save. Will want to pick a name for the font. I'm going to call this one hand letters. And I'll say, Okay, it'll ask me where I went to save this. I'm going to put it on my desktop. But if you wanted to choose a different location and just click this down arrow, you can pick wherever you want. I'll choose Save. We'll get this little green box here, and I'm gonna choose Open saved font. Here's my font that's ready to install. So I'm going to install this. I'm gonna come back to Illustrator and I'll just get out of fonts. Self maker. I'm willing to start a new document, so I'll come up here to File New. I'll come up here to print. I'll choose letter, and then I'll create. Now we'll hit T on my keyboard and I'm just going to click once. And I'll type hello world. I'll get on my selection tool, just make it a little bit bigger by grabbing a corner. And now I'm going to come over here to my character palette and search for hand letters, which is the one I just made. Oops, I need to select it first. And here's my font. 16. 16 Playful typography adjustments: Now I want to show you just a couple of fun and playful things you can do with your fine. First hit Shift T. And that will bring us to the touch-type. You can just move letters around like this. You can make them taller by clicking and dragging this corner. You can resize them by clicking and dragging this corner I'll just undo. Or you can make them wider by clicking and dragging this corner. I'll undo that. And then this dot at the top will allow you to rotate them. You can get some really fun bouncy texts by using this tool, which is the touch-type tool, I'll retype that word and this time we'll come out to the effect panel. Let's go to Warp, will choose arch. If we put our bend at 20 or so, we can get a cool little arch effect for our words. We can also change this to flag shape. Let's increase that a lot. There are a lot of things under here that you can try. Now you have your own handwritten font that you can use it any program that supports fonts like Word, PowerPoint, and of course, the Adobe products. 17. 17 Project: All right, Now it's time for your project. I want you to create your own font using uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and some symbols. You'll need to vectorize your font and then clean it up using editing techniques that you learned in this class. Then use fonts self to create an actual OTF file that you install on your computer. After you've installed it, you can either make a graphic that shows your alphabet or you can just choose a word or a few words that describe how you feel today. Maybe you can even add a few other graphic elements to add interests. All right, I can't wait to see what you create.