Special Features For Typekit & Open Type Fonts
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hey there, in this video we're going to look at Typekit and OpenType fonts, and how awesome they are, because they let us do things like this where this is a font, we've downloaded free from Typekit, but because it's an OpenType font, it allows us to do things like this. You can see, the S, there's an alternative S with a bit of a softer edge. You can see this G here, it's different from the one at the top. This A is kind of more like we draw hand drawn. This L, look at the descender. And also you can go bananas, and just throw them all in, and make a mess. Let's go now into InDesign to learn how to make that beautiful fonts, or like this one, a big fine S.
First up, let's make a new document. We're going to use US Half Letter. So we're going to go to 'Print', and we'll go down to 'Letter-Half'. If you can't see some of these options you can see 'View all presets', it will drop down some other ones. I'm going to use 'Letter-Half', and I'm going to make it 'Portrait'. I'm going to set the margins to '0' and Bleed at '0', at that is all that's going to be good. I'm going to turn off 'Facing Pages'. Click 'Create'. Let's bring in an image, so let's go to 'File', 'Place'. And I want to find, in 'Exercise Files', under '01 Spring' There's one called 'Modern kitchen white yellow background'. And I'm going to drag it from the top, all the way across. It's going to be a little bit bigger than I need. I'll use the Black Arrow just to lift it up, so it's there. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. I'm going to work in my Pasteboard area over here. I'm going to grab the Type tool, drag out a nice big box, and type in 'Spring Sale'.
Now, Typekit is a service provided by Adobe, it's free, well kind of free. It's part of your Creative Cloud license so if you're paying for a license, you've got this. You've got access to it. To get to it all you need to do is have your Type tool on your 'Character Formatting Controls', and up here, where you pick fonts let's go and pick 'Add fonts from Typekit'. And this is where you end up. Typekit is just fonts, there's commercial use. They're just really nice fonts. You can get fonts from free sites, and that's fine but Typekit has some really kind of versatile fonts and OpenType fonts, which we're going to explore the kind of benefits for in a second.
Now when it comes to Typekit not everybody can use it. Mainly because of things like Firewalls in bigger companies. So when I'm teaching, students about 80% of them can do Typekit fine, but there are 20% other people working at big large corporations who don't allow these kind of font syncing thing to work. So if you can't make yours work, talk to your IT department and they'll probably tell you, "No, you can't do it." But for the people that can, you want to go to 'Browse' and along the top here, you can type in, you can see, I can type in anything I like. Get a sense of the font before you start working. Over here on the right, there's a nice way of saying "Actually, I want only the Script fonts please, or the hand drawn fonts." Just a really nice way of reordering and finding the fonts you want.
So the one I want, I know I want Lust. I'm going to use 'Lust'. And you can click on 'Sync'. I've already synced mine. What will happen is, it will take probably 30 seconds to a minute and then the fonts will just start working in InDesign. There's nothing else you need to do. It's a really cool little system. So let's jump back into InDesign. So, I'm going to select my text, and up here, I'm going to pick 'Lust'. And I'll pick this 'Lust Regular'. I'm going to make mine a lot bigger. '72'. 72's too big. Enough that I can see both of those words side by side. Now, why did I pick a Typekit font? It's because it's an OpenType font. How do I know it's an OpenType font? It's because, pretty much all of them that I've got from Typekit are OpenType fonts. And OpenType fonts are just a kind of more complex fonts. If I go to my font menu here, so if I grab my Type tool, and I drop down all my fonts, see these ones that say 'TT' next to them? These are fonts, but they're quite simple. They don't have these ligatures and glyphs that I want to show you, and impress you with next.
So if you are picking a font try and pick ones that either have an 'O' or a 'TK' next to them, for Typekit. These are OpenType fonts as well. You might notice, on your computer, you might have Helvetica and then, another Helvetica NT, or NQ, or something called Pro. Often that will be the difference between that font as a Truetype font or that font as an OpenType font. They look exactly the same for that kind of letters and numbers but it's when it gets to these glyphs and ligatures that it will change. So what I want to do is, first of all I want to make it white for no reason. And grab my Black Arrow. Now, if you can't see this little O down the bottom here you can go to 'InDesign', 'Preferences', and go to 'Advanced Type'. And down the bottom here, there's these two little check boxes you can turn on. If you get sick of that little O, you can turn them off here as well. So turn those both on. I'm going to click 'OK'.
Now why are these great and why do I love them, and get a bit excited by them, is that the person that designed this font made some decisions. They decided that the A's going to be this kind of, like the A that nobody draws. Same with the G, nobody writes their Gs like that, you might. They normally do kind of a loop and a dangly bit. Okay, dangly bit's not the technical word, but a descender that goes down. But also, potentially, the font designer has made some options for you to pick from. And they're called Stylistic Sets. You can find them down here, with that little O. Click on them with the Black Arrow. You can see, if I click on this first one Awesome, huh! So it's changed out these three. So those were decisions that this font designer has made.
A second option for them all. If I turn them on and off, you can see, the A, the S, and the G, all change. If I turn that off, you can see this one. He's probably seen some people designing a flyer and all these kind of like curls, and loops and descenders, all linked together and he's like, "Man, they spend ages with the Pen tool." Often no, they've just gone through, and found a good OpenType font with some good ligatures, and switched them out. You can see, these are bunched in here. So this is doing it for every single thing in this box. Ooh, some cool swatches.
So you can do it individually. So I can just highlight this S here and you'll see, it pops out at the bottom, the options for it. There's only one for the S, let's look at the L. There's quite a few options for this one. I want those, what do I want? Not that one. This is where I spend far too long, kind of going through, and deciding which bits we're going to use. I might switch that G out to the alternative to that. You just kind of work your way through, and decide what you'd like to do, and how far you want to customize this thing. Awesome!
I hope you get access to the Typekit, even if you don't just go and check, the font that you might be using already for work or for a job, or one that you just like might already be an OpenType font and there might be some Stylistic Sets. Not all fonts have them. Also, the exciting ones are either hand drawn or there's more kind of like title display fonts. Let's have the Body Copy ones. You can skip on to the next video now. What I'm going to do is just kind of design, not even design, I'm just going to lay this about there. I'm going to add a rectangle so it can be seen. And I push it to the back. The easiest way to do that is with your Black Arrow is hold 'Command' and the first of the square brackets '[', which is often next to P on your keyboard. Or if you're on a PC, hold down the 'Control', first square bracket '[', and they'll just move it down one place. And I might lower the opacity a little bit as well.
All right, let's save this one. For this course, I'm going to create a folder on my desktop, new folder and I'm going to put everything in here. It's going to be 'InDesign Advanced Course Work'. This one's going to be 'Spring Flyer v1'. All right, on to some more font awesomeness.