Hello, are you ready? It's time to get super duper advanced  with type in Illustrator. Now, a hundred different little things in this video. It's one they're not all separate videos  and just one big mama juma of a video. So sit back, get a bit of pen and paper. Note down the ones that seem to apply to you.

It's good to know what's available. It is pretty nerdy, uh, font nerdy, but you are here. You love font nerdiness. Um, just get on with it, Dan. All right, let's jump in. Alright, uh,  you can open up type advanced from your exercise files.

You might have to sync some fonts if you've ha run into any  problems syncing fonts, just pick something else. Um, I don't mind. Um, so let's get started. First tip is that let's open up window  and let's go to the uh, type. Okay, right down the bottom type  and open up the character panel. So the character panel here,  like there is an option in here.

If I click on this, you get some basic stuff over here. The character panel has just so much more. If I click on it, there is an option to go fly out menu  and go to show options. And you get into this like real nerdy stuff. So that's what we're gonna do, the nerdy stuff. Alright, the first one, I'm gonna duplicate this.

Let's say whether I've got this font selected,  I can go up here, okay? In this little dropdown menu, one  of the handy ones is under filters. I can say I want another sand serif without the little feet. So I want a sands font. Um, and it's gonna go through your whole computer  and go, all right, what has Dan got loaded? That is a saner font.

And I want the saner fonts that have a heavy weight. So it's gonna go through and cut it down. And I can go through now and say,  all right, that one's kind of similar. Wow. Very similar. Okay.

Oh, this one here. Ooh, I like the little tick on that one. So those filters are really handy  and there's lots of options in here. I'm not gonna cover them all,  but the ones that I use the most under filters, okay,  is those the ones I just showed you. But also, um, this width, um, lots  of times I need to squeeze lots of Texan. So I want something that has a condensed option, okay?

And it just gives me the skinny versions of it. The other one that is handy is if I'm picking a font  that's gonna end up being a body copy for a, for a company,  picking a font that has this old style figures. Can you see it drops? Have you ever done it? And you're like, what is this font? Why is that above the X high?

And that's below the baseline. You just want ones that have a standard  set of numbers, okay? That just look nice and work good in terms of phone numbers. And those could be tricky. So that's the way to do it. The one thing you need to do is hit clear all or 'cause like  otherwise you come back into this  and it's always stuck like this.

There's a clear all button here to clear them, right? So there's lots of other ones that go in the filters. I'll let you have a play. And the other one that I use a lot is, let's say this,  uh, avant-garde, okay? I use a lot. What I can do down here is  hit this little star button.

I've cleared mine for the beginning of this course,  which is a pain, but I want it  to be fresh in store for you, okay? But see this little star button? Okay, let's say use that one. The other one that I use lots is,  let's say I use Roberto a lot. Okay? You can go through and say, all right Mr.

Roberto, okay, I'm gonna say Roberto. I kind of clicked on it. Then kind of come back into here  to get the family and say, I want the family to be starred. And it just means later on when you're like, okay,  I am working on this thing, I can say,  you just show me the favorites and it just  Cuts it down. And the  same thing that happens with the filters. You've gotta move it clear all  otherwise it doesn't come back.

It's kinda stuck that way forever. Another really handy one is, let's say that I'm using,  I'm gonna duplicate this. One is I use a font last all the time. When I think, uh, luxury kind of, I don't know,  I love this font, okay? But I end up using it way too much. I only selected part of it.

Let's go to lust. Ah, that's weird. I've used a glyph here. Okay, we'll talk about glyphs in a bit,  but it didn't have that version of a queue. So I didn't know what to do in lust. Let's just type in Q.

There we go. Alright. So I love lust, okay,  but I used it too much. So what you can do is I've got it selected. Here's lust. There's this little wavy thing  and this is show me similar fonts to that.

And it's gonna look on your computer  and say, Hey, uh, on your computer,  these are the other fonts that are like this. Now in my case, it has done nothing. Why? I think I picked a really weird version of lust. Let's go to regular. Okay?

It doesn't always work. Okay, I've some fonts, it just doesn't work  for let's go show similar. That's better. So the regular version, it's gone. Hey, look at all these. They're very like lust,  but they're not the same old font you used in  so visually similar.

I love that little wavy line. And you can keep going down the rabbit hole. You might be like, ooh, kind of like this,  a thick one that is kind of wavy. It's so visually similar to this one. And you end up down kind  of like a font picking rabbit hole half a day later. Anyway, what we're gonna do here is we're gonna get back  and that is visually similar.

And the other one  that I find handy in the character panel is we are gonna go  to finding ones on Adobe fonts. Okay, well let's say I like Victor. Okay, I'm going to grab it. I want, I'm gonna replace that queue  'cause that gave me problems before, just  with a regular queue from the font. And I'm gonna go up to here  and I'm gonna say at the moment we're dealing with fonts  that are on my computer. If you've just installed um, illustrator, okay?

There are a bunch of fonts on Adobe fonts. It takes a little while. You can click on find more  and it's gonna go and have a look at other things  from Adobe Fonts. There is lots here. It can take a little while to load. So what you might say is I wanna find a font  that is not currently on my computer.

Okay? That is uh, saner, uh, sorry, a serif font. Okay? That has a really thin option, okay? And it's gonna go through all of Adobe fonts. These aren't installed on my computer yet, okay?

They're not what's called synced. You might decide, okay, I like this one. Now I can kind of preview it. It's brilliant. Okay, I've gotta click on this option here to activate it. I said sync, but really, I mean activate.

Do I want all seven of the different weights? I'm gonna say, yep, you can see it's kind of doing its work  and it takes a second activating, what's it called? And Tina, okay? But I should now be able to come out of,  find more into fonts. It's a little confusing between these two here. Okay?

I had a little beep going, okay,  where it means now I can click on this and go, all right,  and Tina hasn't loaded yet. Please hold. Actually this is a good, uh, I've done this,  but I've still got my filters on. Okay? So I'm gonna turn the clear the filters  and there's anti, there we go. That's all installed on my machine.

So find more is good. Okay? I often actually just jump out to fonts  Adobe.com, the exact same thing, except I find it easier  to find fonts that I like. You can still use, okay? The um, you can go to brows,  you can still use the filters, okay? A lot of them are in here, okay?

But I get to see kind of like versions of it. So often I see a font I'm like, by itself is not cool,  but this kinda with all the different weights and widths  and oh it's very cool  and I can click add family that'll do the exact same thing. So whether you want to go via the dropdown here, find more,  which is the kind of small, don't have  to leave illustrated version  or jumping out to fonts, adobe.com, it doesn't matter. Um, to build on top of that, what is good is I've gone  through forever and loaded a lot of fonts. There used to be a limit on them. You could only download a hundred.

They've given up on that. 'cause I, I don't know, somehow I  was allowed to do thousands. And what you can do is you say, I want a new font,  but I want some of the ones that are already picked. I've probably selected a bunch already that I can pick from. So I can go down to here. I can say filter, buy, see,  there's little tick mark here says show the activated fonts.

That just means ones that are not like default fonts on my  machine ones I've downloaded and activated from Adobe Fonts  and I've been very careful when I've selected these kind of,  okay, clearly. Um, but it just cuts it down  to like some stuff that I've actually picked. So I find this as a better way to kind of pick my next font  'cause I've already got some font love for these guys. I've made a choice. So that's handy. Next is, let's look at stylistic sets.

So we've looked at glyphs in the last essentials course,  but if I select on this, depending on the font  and whether it has these things called glyphs,  this is just something that's kind of an alternative for  that, um, particular letter. Okay? Not all fonts have it, but some of them do. Okay? And you can find them all under type and under glyphs  and you'll find all the kind of extras that are in here. And you can see this one here, Q has this other option.

P has an alternative option as well. Okay? So if I highlight this, NN if I hold it down in here has,  ooh, that's a cool one, okay? You'll find alternatives for it. But that's kind of just like randomly picking them. What ends up happening is of hit undo is the designer, okay?

The Typographer photographer Typographer has actually gone  and created sets, okay? So they've gone and said, all right, this is a kind  of a group of all of those kind  of all those styles of glyphs together. So I'm gonna make it duplicate of it  and it's just a easy way to go. What do they all look like in this different set? Okay? So I'm gonna go up to the open type panel.

If you can't see it, it should  have opened with a character panel. But if you go down to type, there's one called Open Type. And with it selected, you can go up to this Flyout menu  and say, show me the different stylistic sets  that this font comes with. If there's zero in here,  there's just zero, there's no way of getting them. Um, some fonts have it, some don't. So let's go to set one.

Okay, that's the one we're on. Let's go set two. Okay. And you can just see it just kind of, you know, shows you  that's a set that the designer has done with all these kind  of very similar kind of, um, extras that are on it. So let's look at the third one. And what you can do is you can actually turn them all on  and have some of them off.

Okay? So you can kind of toggle. I'm gonna turn all those off and it's showing me step three  only you can see in this case,  D has no alternatives. Whoever designed this font went D you're boring,  you're not getting anything else. Some fonts will be different. So those are stylistic sense  and that's why open type fonts generally are better than  true type fonts if you are downloading them.

If you get two options, use the open type font. Let's move on to variable fonts. These are awesome love variable fonts. Uh, let's grab, I'm gonna grab my little logo thing here. Making a big mess. Everybody have the same mess as me.

Um, I'm gonna click on this one. I'm gonna go and have a look at, uh, acumen. If you don't have Acumen, you,  I think it's default for everybody. If it's not, I'm gonna click on it. Okay? Um, you can download it from Adobe Fonts.

Otherwise go and have a look  and see if you can find any other variable fonts. The way to know is, can you see here,  this is an open type font that has the word  or next to it, it's variable. You can search for variable fonts on Adobe fonts. You can say, all right, browse all and up the top here. Show me ones that have variable fonts, okay? And go through those.

Why are they so awesome? It's 'cause of this magic. See this little button here? Okay, it's a whole other panel. And this one here I've picked  because it has both weight width and slant. I'm ready.

Seti, I think this is magic. Ready? It just gets bigger. There's no like, you know  how you go from like, uh, light, thin, medium, regular,  uh, bowl black, you're not sure which one is which, okay? You kind of cycle through them. Or 100, 200, 300 is another way that fonts get done.

Can you see this one here? It doesn't just wrap a  thick liner on the outside. The, you know, the typographers actually gone add this. It's quite balanced in terms of its thickness. Whereas here, you know,  different parts end up getting bigger at different options. I'm gonna go to this version of it  'cause I think it's easier to work  with over here so you can see it.

Um, same, same. Um, again,  so weight is one but you can do width. Okay, so condensed version or compressed. Um, I forget which one's the most skinny version,  but you can get to a really big extended version as well. This one here doesn't have a really big extended version,  so there's some limits within it. Okay?

So some of the fonts will stretch right out  and sl, which is basically kind of like italics  and it's not just leaning it over,  it's actually redesigning it. Okay, well there's thought into like what happens  to this font when it does get turned over on its side. Has anybody done the like false italic? Can you just like squish it over? You've done it, I've done it, we've all done it. But when you are picking a kind of a large font  for a company that you're working for,  you'll do yourselves a lot of favors.

If you can use a variable font, there is still the kind  of preset options watch. I can still go to all of these things  that I discussed, okay? They're all still in there. Okay? So you can say, hey, we use condensed bold. So it's still in there, but really what it is,  is the sliders at these positions.

There are some other options. Those aren't the other options. There's another one that I was using the other day. Where is it? Minion, minion. Minion variable.

Okay is if I go into here, I love this optical size. So the weight, okay, there's the thickness. Oh, can you see the difference? Can you see when it gets heavier, the actual  ascender up here comes down. It's really interesting, you know, it's thoughtful,  Okay? Rather than just  wrapping a stroke around it  with like false bold, let's pick this.

Um, I've got some weird tracking going on that might,  you might be killing yourself with that. Let's go to zero. Um, this one here has optical size,  which I find really interesting. Like it's different from weight somehow. It's not changing the size,  but it's like how visibly big it feels. Okay, you know, it's still a  what do we got a 116 point font.

So it's not changing the size but it like the way it feels. That feels like a small font. This feels like a big font. So you will find some of them just have weight. Some of them just have slant,  but do dig in for variable fonts, they can,  I dunno, I think they're brilliant. Alright, let's talk about some, let's do this.

Let's grab the type tool  and we're gonna use a type area box. A type area box is click hold and drag drag direct. It's gonna fill it with placeholder text. I'm just gonna put in my name. Okay? What you'll find is this for everybody,  this is advanced stuff, okay?

Sometimes you just want it in the middle  because you've got maybe multiple text boxes  with different sizes in here. So this one is Dan Scott and two letters, okay? What I can do is I can select both of these, go up to type  and go to type area options, okay? I've mixed that up area type options  and there's this option that I find quite useful. Align center, it's kind of new  and it puts it in the center of the text box. Let's click make sure preview's on let's click okay.

We can use cent fonts as well. And it's just the way, I don't know,  there'll be a few people out there going,  oh finally you can put stuff in the middle of this text box. Whereas before you kind of had to fudge it. Another really useful kind  of type area text box thing is watch this. If I grab the type tool,  drag out another type area box, okay? Which means I've dragged it, it's filled it up.

And if you've ever done this where you're like okay  that was great and you delete it  and you're like Oh what is it? Why can't it go up? Or if I add more text it becomes what's called overset. And you can see there there's a little red box  and you're like, oh it's too much text, I can't see it. You can click on it and drag out another box  that's linking two area type box together. It's not what I want.

I want to kind  of just expand and contract. So what I can do is I can grab my type tool, uh, sorry,  my selection tool and you can just double click the bottom. Nope, double click this option. That's it. Okay. And that will turn it into what's called an auto height box.

And now what it means is it's just a,  I think a better default. Okay, delete some stuff. Can you see the bottom comes up  and when it gets bigger it goes down. You can do it the long way as well. Uh, with it selected go to type and go back to where we were  before the area type options  and there is order size,  you turn on and off that way as well. Alright?

Alright. Next is, uh, aligning things. So, um, in the past it's been really tricky to align things. Let's open up the align panel. Actually let's got a window. Let's open up align.

Okay? And just have that ready. Now what's happened is if you wanna align this  and this together, so these are just text box in a  weird shape I made. If I align to the bottom, can you see it lines to the bottom  of the text box, which is really weird and you end up kind  Of either outlining it or just trying  to like get it to line up, you know? Yeah, that's close enough. Get guides out.

Who's done that? Hands up. Okay, watch this. Okay, what you can say is under the line tool,  I don't have to have anything selected. I can say a line to the glyph bounce. So glyphs are the kind of like parts,  these characters in here, okay?

Um, point text is just when you click once  and the text line goes along for a long time. Rie text is the big box we're gonna use point  text 'cause that's what this is. It's just a line of text. So I'm gonna align to that. Watch this. And I click both of them  and I say align bottom look, it aligns.

Which do up, can you see there it aligns to the bottom  of the queue of that descender. It gets better. Watch this. If I say you are,  this is no dumb questions, this is kind  of a forum that I'm working on. Um, say it's no dumb answers. Okay?

Same thing. Click it, make sure that setting is on  and watch align to the bottom. Look it aligned to the bottom. Okay, there you go. Now it's aligning to the, this is a strange font  as in the baseline. This kind of d dips below it.

So there you go. It doesn't quite line up well actually it does. It just depends on what part you want it to line up to. I have that on, especially when doing logo design. I want things to line up to the actual letters, not the box  that that letters are in. Let's go further down the rabbit hole.

And what I want to do is grab a version of the an object  and some type, okay? And I'm gonna go up here, have the uh, line  and character panel open. Now um, there's this thing called snap to glyph. Yours might not be visible. Go to the character panel and go to uh, show snap to Glyph. Okay?

To turn it on And glyphs are  considered these like characters, okay? These individual letters inside of this font. And what we can do is we can actually snap to them. Now if yours are grayed out,  it probably means smart guides are turned off. So command you, control you to turn it back on  or there it's smart guides. Alright, I'm back.

One of the reason  that might not be turned on is under view. Go down to here, snap  to glyph might be off and then it graze out. So make sure that on as well  as smart lights carry on, you can see mine's enabled. You can decide on which I'm just turn them all on. Yeah, you know, they're on, they're kind of dark. So what happens is, now I wanna line this up.

Can you see, I'll get the editor jump in,  but can you see it's aligning to the baseline? You're like, oh it's just aligning to the baseline  or like the glyph bound there at the bottom. It might be right at the top. Um, it might be the glyph bound at the top of it,  you can see the X height. There's all sorts of things that it can connect up to. Now with that turned on, so it just makes it easier  for lining stuff up.

So just kind of visually going, you tongue out going,  that's close enough, you've done it. I know you have. Okay, so that's snap to glyph. There's so much more to it. I don't wanna cover it all. I just wanna give you one more kinda like for instance,  'cause let's have a look.

So if I type in a Y here for no good reason, okay,  I'm gonna put some spaces in  and if I have my black arrow selected, I can right click. I'm gonna make sure this one's on. Okay? The angular guides. If I right click this one now and say I wanna snap to the Y. Okay?

If I right click this one it'll  Snap snap to the N. Okay? So I can snap to the y, I can see you,  it's kinda highlighted it. And when I rotate this, which, what happens? Oh look it matched the Y  oh, why am I so excited? I don't know, it's nerdy and it's cool  and it will help probably three people in the world.

But it's a good for instance of like all of these things,  there's lots of options in here  and they keep growing them as well. Alright, I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually leave that one alone. I'm going to duplicate this. How does the Y go away? I don't know, I just kind of like, I release snap. There you go.

I just ignore it,  close my file and it goes away. Alright, last but not least, we could,  I can make a whole course on fonts. Um, probably should. Um,  but I, one of the more advanced useful things is  looking at font sizing. So at the moment I've got this, I want the,  let's say we're gonna make this uppercase. So in DQ, okay, I want it  to be the same height as this, okay?

So what you can do is you can say, I know the height  of this, it is a height of whatever is in here. Mine set a millimeters, yours might be inches or pixels. Just copy it. I've select it at all  by like clicking a few times. Grab it all, copy it, okay? And I click on this.

What we can do is it can say at the moment it's been,  you know, it's got something called uh, font size. Okay? And it's to do with like what's called the M height. We can change that to go this little flyout menu. We can say show me the way font heights  are actually measured. Okay?

That's this box here. So that's the M height. Basically it's used as the capital M is the height. Okay? We can say, actually show me the cap height,  which is the really baseline here all the way to the top,  not this little thing that hangs below it, okay? On the cap height.

And what we can say is, I just,  I don't really mind what it is. I'm gonna delete that and paste in the whatever it was. It was 32 37 millimeters. Okay, I'm gonna hit enter  and it's gonna be the exact same height as that. Now go on. It's a way of just saying, all right,  I'm gonna deal with fonts a different way.

I'm gonna make sure they're all the same height, not kind  of, you know how like a, I dunno,  a 12 point font is different for lots of different fonts. You can switch it to show different ways  of measuring their height and their cap. Height is often a great way to show consistent font, kind  of like actual height rather than the vague uh, m height. I'm totally losing you now, aren't I? Anyway, it's good for matching sizes of things  to the size of fonts. Man, that was a deep dark hole, wouldn't it?

We could go deeper. We won't. For the moment though, I feel like your brain  is probably melted. Hopefully you took lots of notes  and even if they don't all stick in your  head, at least you'll know. If you end up at a job where you do a lot  of something repetitively over  and over, it might be like, oh, isn't there a way  that I can, and you will find it. You'll either come back to this video, um,  or you'll be able to kind of like work your way  through the car panels now that you're kinda more advanced  and go, all right, there is a way of doing this.

I just need to spend five minutes Googling it or looking  or coming back to this video. All right my friends, you are now type advanced. I bet you no one else that you know knows  as much about fonts and type in illustrator. It's nerdy but useful. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Let's make the next one shorter, Dan.

Okay, I'll see you over there.