How to Use the Retype Tool in Adobe Illustrator for Powerful Typography Editing

In this post, I will show you how the Retype tool can help you with typography and design in Illustrator. Retype is an incredible productivity tool that allows you to identify a specific font in an image and, even better, it can turn static text from an image or outlined text in a vector design into live and editable type. It’s great for making quick edits to any design without needing to start from square one.

This post is based on my Illustrator Advanced course. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to this course as well as my 30+ additional courses on Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Figma, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

Follow along and be amazed by the power of the Retype tool! 

How can the Retype Tool help designers?

Typography is key to efficient and clear visual communication. Font management is tricky and requires time and persistence to master. Any help we can get is useful for meeting our clients’ needs and tight schedules, so developers like Adobe are always trying to create and update tools and features to make our typography tasks easier, saving us precious time and energy.

Retype is different from other type tools in Illustrator. Based on advanced character recognition, it is perfect for working with images or scanned documents and updating previous designs without having to create new text objects from zero. Retype is only a couple of clicks away from:

Font matching

Converting static or outlined text into editable text

Let’s find out how all of this works!

How to Match a Font using Retype in Illustrator

Let’s begin by creating a new Illustrator .ai document. Any size you prefer is fine. Next, we will place two images inside the artboard. The images used in this quick and easy step-by-step guide are part of the exclusive Illustrator Advanced course Exercise Files, available for BYOL students. Feel free to use your own images as well, just make sure the text included is clear for Illustrator to read. Blurry or heavily pixelated images may cause some issues.

We will be working with the photo of an embossed metal sign and a detail from a scanned mockup document. Both of these are single-layered, raster (pixel-based) JPEG files.

As you know, to place the images inside our Artboard, we can go to File in the top menu and select Place or use the shortcut Shift + Command + P on a Mac or Shift + Control + P on a PC.

Let’s see how we match fonts using Retype. Making sure the first image is selected, let’s open the Retype panel. Click on Type in the top menu, hover the mouse cursor over Retype (Beta) and pick the Match Font feature.

Once Retype is active, Illustrator reads the image and previews all the text elements which are clearly visible, helping us with our selection. Detected text elements are surrounded by a dashed bounding box and all we need to do is click on the specific set of characters we want to match.

Retype will display the typeface used on that word, or the closest match it can find, because typography is often edited or reshaped to add unique forms to its characters.

As we can see above, there are some differences between the original and the font that Retype picked to match with the text, but it is pretty close. I’ve picked a more complex example to show you that Retype font matching isn’t always 100% accurate. This happens because:

Adobe Fonts (the font source collection for Retype) doesn’t include this specific typeface or font is brand-exclusive.

The warp effect makes character recognition a bit more difficult.

The wordmark was edited to give typography the brand’s exclusive look.

Even though it’s not perfect, the results are pretty amazing, right? And it only takes a few seconds! How many hours do we spend each week, month, or year scrolling up and down font lists? If Retype can lead us closer to the font we are looking for, that’s a huge help, right? Awesome!

Click Exit on the bottom of the Retype panel and let’s push on!

Timeout #1

Discover exciting font matching and pairing tips on my blog post dedicated to typography. 

How to Turn Static Text into Editable Text

This is the true game-changer about Retype, in my opinion. Let’s say we need to update the embossed metal sign’s typography and change the word “Whiskey” to something different. Do we have to do it from scratch?

Not at all! Follow along, it’s quick and easy!

If you didn’t close it, you are still inside Retype and you now have two options close to the bottom of the panel. Match Font and Edit Text. Click on the second. If you close the panel, you can go back to Type in the top menu, hover over Retype (Beta) and, this time, select Edit Text from the flyout menu.

Let’s click on the bounding box around the word “Whiskey” to have Retype look for the matching font. You already know how this goes so, next step!

Illustrator recommends a different type face for this sample, most likely because of the warp effect added to the previous text element. It’s still not 100% accurate but let’s assume the client is OK with it (for this blog post’s purpose, of course) and move on. You can scroll down the box to the left and see if any other option fits closer to the original.

Next, we double-click the highlighted text box to apply the font we selected from the left scroll box to create in seconds a new editable text object.

Note: If this is the first time you are using Retype or some update is requested (remember this is a Beta version for this tool), Illustrator may have to connect to the server to install new resources. Have some patience and allow for the necessary download.

This time's for real, double-click the word “Whiskey”, sit back, and get ready to be amazed!

(Imagine the sound of a drum roll, please…)

Yes! Illustrator has created a new vector text object over our initial image, fully editable, set with the font it matched seconds ago! Click Exit to start editing!

As you can see below, and I meant to keep this as a little surprise, there is also a bit of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) working behind the Retype tool, because the original type was removed from the image and replaced with a matching background color.

Pro Tip: Be aware, this is a destructive design process, so I always recommended you keep a backup of the original image before working with Retype and these new features.

To wrap up this first example, let’s type something fun to complete our renewed embossed metal sign. I’ll go for “Water” for a humorous twist. To add some realism, I’ll also adjust the font color and add a light shadow behind the text.

There’s a lot more we can do to make it look even better, but that’s not the goal for this post, so play around with your text, warp it, give it new colors, let your imagination flow freely! When you are happy with the result, follow me for a quick second example.

Timeout #2

Typography is an art and one of the most important principles in graphic design. Get inspired with this collection of artworks from designers and artists and start building up your very own typography portfolio!

Let’s have a look at the same process, this time over a scanned mockup document.

Pro tip: As I mentioned before, Retype is great for font matching from pixel images, but it also works with vector-based designs with outlined text objects.

Moving on!

Let’s repeat the previous steps. Select the second image with the Selection tool. Access the Retype panel and select Match Font. For this example, I have selected the brand’s name “Granada” and Illustrator gives us a 100% accuracy match, so we are riding the easy road to streamlined workflow!

Can you guess the next step? Of course you can!

Click Next to exit Match Font mode and click on Edit Text. Double-click the “Granada” bounding box to generate a new editable text object – and remove the original type from the background, all in a single action. Nice!

All we need to do is change our brand’s name to something sexier and engaging and repeat, if necessary, for the remaining text elements.

And There We Have It!

Retype is an awesome tool that combines character recognition and generative AI to bring a revolution into typography and graphic design – pixel or vector-based! You may have noticed some minor issues, small spots left behind when the new background was generated. I left these on purpose, just to remind you that Retype is still in Beta version and generative AI is still learning and perfecting itself, so always keep a watchful eye for the tiniest details, that will make you stand out from your competitors on many occasions.

What 's Next?

To go deeper with Illustrator, join BYOL and you will gain access to my Illustrator Essentials and Advanced courses as well as my 30+ additional courses on Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Figma, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

See you in class! – Dan