Advanced Type Trick & Workflows in Adobe Photoshop

Hi there, this video is all about Advanced Type. I'm going to show you how to get the most out of Typekit, how to find visually similar fonts, how to set favorites, how to use OpenType fonts, variable fonts. Starts off with a really cool helpful stuff, and eventually we get into the weirds, with the nerdy stuff, like Anti Aliasing and CSS of fonts. Plus hang around to the end, I save a cool thing called Font Pairing to the end, where we go through, we figure out how to match fonts. Headings and Body Copy, just to get ourselves out of our normal font matching. I'll see you there, all right, let's get started, it is a long one.

 
To get started open up any file. I've given us one, just so we've got something to use. It's in '08 Typography', it's called 'Type 1'. Thank you, Kait Herzog. So grab the Type Tool, and the first little trick is, if I go up to here, to my fonts, they're still my fonts but they're really small. So first little trick is, go to 'Type', 'Font Preview Size', and go to 'Huge'. It just means when I go back in, it's going to give me a better sample size. You might pick extra large, huge might be actually huge. Let's quickly introduce Typekit. If you're already using it, awesome. We're going to move past it real quick, if you're not, the skinny version is, drop down your fonts here, click on this one that says 'Add Font from Typekit'. A website's going to open, here it is. 

I'm logged into my Creative Cloud account. I'm at this Browse option here. I'm going to ignore this first chunk, we'll come back to that. And down here, it's just, all it is, is commercially usable fonts that I get to use for free. And by free it means that I've licensed them through my Creative Cloud license. It's all kind of tied into that, so it doesn't cost me anything. Up here yours is probably going to have the word Sample Text. So if I'm working on-- I need the word Hello for that project. So you can type in 'Hello', and just look on here and say, "Which fonts do I want to use?" The nice thing about them is, instead of a site like 1001 Freefonts or Dafont, what you'll find is fonts that are a bit more usable. They have a lot of the glyphs and ligatures we need for other languages, but if you need a font shaped like a cactus or a blood dripping font, you probably have to go out to those other sites, but in here, it's some really pretty stuff.

So let's say that I like this one, I just click on it. I can go into and have a look at what levels they are, in terms of weights, widths, that sort of stuff. You can see it here, and you can go to this one that says 'Sync All'. And that will download into Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator. Super cool, this one here only has one font in the family. You might find that there's a whole host of kind of different styles of the fonts, weights of the fonts, and you can sync them all. There's nothing to do, they just start working in Photoshop. 

The other thing you can do in Typekit is, don't forget these things over here, so say you're looking for a Slab Serif, it's going to go and just kind of sort out all the fonts, that it has available for you in that kind of style. The big heavy Serifs on the edges here. Am I looking for a handwritten font, or say a Headings font versus a Paragraph font? It's really detailed, the weights, the widths, what kind of X height does it have. Super helpful. This one I find useful, picking a font for a client that has this weird drop down on the baseline font, client comes back and says, "The fonts are all mixed up." And I'm like, "No, they're meant to be like that." Spend the rest of your time trying to track these things up and down. Anyway, so that's the skinny version of Typekit. Let's apply that font and just, it will sink in the background as my slow internet does its thing, and we'll see if Elijah appears. 

Somehow I've exceeded my sync limit by a lot. I don't know how I've done that, don't tell Adobe. Back in Photoshop, you can see, this is just updated here. It says it's being added, I'm going to click in here and type in "Hello". Got it selected, I'm going to find, there it is there, just ready to go. Change the color to-- good. I'll scale it up so you can see. Too big. So let's get into some more advanced stuff. So when I'm working with my 'Type Tool', up here, because I've spent so much time thinking about the Typekit fonts that I need, because remember, I only got 100, kind of. These little settings up here are really important for me. So if I click on 'Typekit' it's only going to show me the fonts that have come down from Typekit, and often it just clears out all the junk, and just gets my font list into a usable list of fonts that I've chosen for different projects. 

The other thing you can do is, make sure you turn Typekit 'off' otherwise it's going to always sample it. Say that we're using a couple of fonts over and over, like that new one here. Hit the star ' * ', and grab the ones that you use a lot. Maybe Arial, because you have to, because of your client. And let's say up here, I'm using Museo for my business. Let's say, this one here, so I'm going to get a star to it. The nice thing about it is you can just click on the star. It just gives you the ones that you've starred. Plus all the weights, they go along with it, so just tidies up that list. If you're like me, and you've traveled the world as a freelance designer, and you've appropriated like a zillion fonts in your life, man, the font menu can be real tough. 

And this next little feature where it says Filter is the most important. So 'Filter' here, I want to go through all my fonts and pick out the Script fonts. Now the crazy thing about it is that I didn't tag, like this one, this is from Typekit, so Typekit went and added a tag to it that said, I am a Script font, but this one here just happens to be on my computer. Lots of these O types here or these TT fonts, are just stuff that was lying around on my computer, but somehow Photoshop knows which is a Script font and which is not, it's bananas. If you ever try to do it using your Font Book or-- I haven't used those font library things for a long time. Suitcase, that was the one, maybe trying to sort out your fonts in a suitcase. Good as we don't have to do that anymore. 

So filtering just goes through and says, "I want all the handwritten fonts from your computer." This might be a font that you downloaded from 1001 Freefonts or Font Squirrel. Somehow it knows. Make sure when you finish though, go back to 'All', because it stays on those, can be confusing. Let's say we pick a font, say it's this Lust here, and we like it, I liked it. But the client says, "It's a little bit too feminine for our Colorado sign here." Let's be more manly, but similar. Imagine if there was a way to have our Text Layer selected, just on my Move Tool. With 'Text Layer' selected, go to your 'Type Tool', don't have to have it highlighted, but I can go to here, and look at this, a wavy one. Weird as I kind of know, I don't know how that works, but it's the 'Show Similar Fonts', give it a click. And it's gone through all of my Type. And match Lust with all kind of other things that match it. 

You can see, these are the ones that are all on my machine. Just knows, I know, Curls, so it's not perfect. But it's gone through and picked them all, pretty amazing. So client says you have to use Comic Sans, and you're like, "Oh, no." But let's see if we can find something that is similar to Comic Sans. But it's not Comic Sans, we're not going to get in trouble from the design place. Here we go, look at that, look at that one, Proxima Soft, they're never going to know. Any other ones in there. Even that, anything, as long as it's not Comic Sans. 

Now, just so you know, the ones that have got the stars here are the ones that are on your machine. Eventually you'll get to this line that says, "Hey, we're now showing you fonts that we've downloaded, not downloaded from Typekit, but we're showing you, previewing from Typekit." So they won't work until you click that button, but because it's part of your license, you just give it a click, and let's say, 'Sofia'. Just give it a click and it's going to sync, and work, it's pretty magic. You see there, so if your font, Pro was installed, still thinking about it. Where did it go? Sofia, there it is there. Let's get even more advanced, let's pick, I'm going to pick Lust, really like it. Say I want this one here, actually no. I like the Italic one. Now if you've picked a font that's one of two things, it's either a Typekit font, or this O, OpenType font, so OpenType fonts and Typekit fonts are the same. One's come from Typekit, but it's still an OpenType font. The ones that are not bad, but the older style ones, these Truetype fonts, these TT ones, I'm going to do this. 

So if you're picking a font, pick an O or a TK. It doesn't guarantee this is going to work, but it's more likely to. So if I highlight the word H, you can see it's giving me alternatives for that selection. This is an easy way to find the glyphs and all ligatures for different font sets. So I'm going to go to-- I like the, where is it, I like the Italic one. Actually I'm going to go to 'Regular'. And if I highlight the H, you can see, there is actually an alternative that the font designer's picked. And I can choose it for my design. Same with the E, if I highlight this, not the whole thing, just the E, hover above it. There's all sorts of different-- I'm going overboard here. But you get what I mean, right? 

There's all these kind of things that you're like, "Man, how did they do that?" Often with Type, there's just some beautiful ligatures. It's also what happens, sometimes you've got fonts on your computer, and it says, "You've got Arial, but you've got Arial Pro", and you're like, "They're the same font." All these extra glyphs and ligatures, or contextual alternatives, whatever you want to call them. There is another way to find these rather than-- well, if that doesn't appear for you, one of two things, the font, even though it might be an OpenType font, just doesn't have ligatures, or there might be a Pro version you can go and upgrade to. So often what you have to do, say I'm doing a Body Copy font for a large client, and they have multilingual or multi language, it might be a version of the font by Garamond, but I need the Garamond Pro, because I need all the extra weird accents above the letters. 

Say for Irish, where I'm at, or Mary, from where I am born, those languages use all sorts of extras to adjust the Latin letters. You can tell I really don't know what that's called. The little ticks and whippets. So if you don't have it, it might not be in the font, but double check, under 'Photoshop', 'Preferences', go down to 'Type', and in here there's one that says, 'Enable Type Layer Glyph Alternatives'. If you get sick of that thing popping up you can turn it off. It's on by default, so it's probably still on maybe. The other thing you can check to 100% know if it has it or not, have the 'Font Layer' selected, and go to 'Window', you're looking for this one called Glyphs. Mine's defaulted to Alternatives for this selection, because that's what that's doing, right? It's going, when I hold over the selection, give me alternatives for it. 

I'm just going to switch it to the entire font. I'm going to make this bigger. And now I can see all the extras that it has. Ligatures, some just extra punctuation, all sorts of bits and pieces in here. I love that R. I need to find a use for the R. Let's close it down. One of the other things I'm going to show you before we go is, it's new, but old, it was something that got introduced a long time ago and never took off, but it's coming back, it's called Variable fonts. What are they? They're pretty magic. What you're looking for is-- doesn't matter which one. Actually large is too big. Huge, let's go to Extra Large. So I'm going to grab my-- doesn't really matter if you're using this one or the Type towards the top, I'm going to go over here now just to mix that up. What we're looking for is, we saw OpenType, can you see, OpenType VAR, variable fonts, I'm going to click on this one, you won't have many on your machine. They're really expensive to buy. 

There's another one there, so you just go scroll through, there's no searching in here for variable fonts yet. So you're going to have to do some serious scrolling, you probably don't have many. So I'm going to use this one here, Acumin Variable Font, and what you're going to get, might have to extend your Properties Panel out to see the whole thing. This chunk. You're like, "Hmm, what does that do?" Imagine if you could have a font that had - I'm going to put that to 0. - a variable weight. Not just like Light, Extra light, Condensed light. Look at this, you just drag it. Has like a zillion different properties. And it's not like-- we've all done it right, we've hacked up font together, like put a Stroke around it to make it heavier. This here is actually designed by somebody, of all these different sizes, so that it reads well, and is beautiful. It's the same with the weights, I can look at the width, I can lower that down to make a condensed font or compressed, italicizing it. It's pretty amazing. 

So if you are in charge of picking a font, and you know it's going to be-- say you're working at a place, and it is, it's huge. They do scientific documentation for atomic energy. I don't know why I pick that. But I feel like they're going to need lots of different weights, and sizes, and slants, and languages. A variable font might be right for you. Let's say that you are doing a lot of Web design or UI App design in Photoshop. Just so you know, we're getting nerdier and nerdier here. 

So let's say that I'm designing a N type kit here. One of the options is, up here it says, Include web-only families', turn you 'on'. And say you pick a font, and you like Mighty Slab, it's awesome. What you need to do is just double check that it's actually a Web font and not just a Desktop font, because you want to use this in your app or in your website. So you can't just pick any font, right? Because we want it loaded with CSS rather than be an image. So what you're looking for, while this thing is loading and spending awhile, can you see, that option means, I can download it for my desktop, this option means it's available, it's what Typekit calls a Kit. You can load them to a Kit. Web stuff downloading for your computer. 

So this is available for a web project, so that's awesome. So what I want to do is, back into Photoshop, we pick our font. What is that one? Mighty slab, I don't think I have that one. It's going to pick something else. Something kind of Body Copy-ish Roboto. It's like the Arial of the internet. You're looking for a Body Copy font, Roboto is a good one. YouTube use it, I use it loads as well, but we need to use it quite small. And this is just a mock out, remember, in Photoshop. It's not going out to a website yet, but I need to use it quite small, and it's done the pixelate as it gets quite small, because it's just, there's not a lot of room for it. So what you can do, just to make sure it's legible, first of all don't use white, let's go to black. And we're going to look at-- so I've got this layer selected, Rello. Actually what I might do as well in here, just after Rello, I'm going to put in a space, and then I'm going to go 'Type', I'm going to go to 'Paste Lorem Ipsum'. Just so I've got lots of text in here, so you can see it a bit easier. Just paste in an arbitrary amount of Lorem Ipsum, quite a bit actually. You get the idea, but it's quite small, what you can do just to make sure it's doing as good as it can, or look as good as it can in this mockup, is with the 'Layer' selected, go to your 'Type Tool', there's this option up here. It's the Anti Aliasing of the font. Don't worry too much about it, but the font kind of ends up looking like this horrible stuff.

 
There's a little bit of magic that goes on top of it to smooth the edges. The computer does it as it shows it to you. Don't worry about that either, basically you've got options to tell the computer to kind of redraw it in different ways. So I can click on 'Sharp', that's the way it came, 'Crisp'. Strong and smooth. You can see, actually it's the same font, same weight, just kind of redrawn slightly differently. So you might find that your font and your color might just need a different one of these to look nice in your mockup. It will look perfect in your website because the browser draws it. Let's say you're not doing web stuff, you're just doing normal flyer design. So I'm going to increase the font. So when you get to a certain size it doesn't matter anymore. Doesn't matter, it's not as important.

So I'm going to go down to something, so say this is a Body Copy for a flyer that I'm doing, and I want it to be easier to read. So with the 'Layer' selected, 'Type Tool', just work your way through. Decide, sharp versus crisp, I like sharp better. Strong versus sharp, and I just kind of run them off each other. It's hard to tell the difference between those two. I like strong best, so strong and smooth. Strong, awesome. So great for small fonts. Normally it's mockups, Ts and Cs down the bottom. And that's called Anti Aliasing. 

Let's say you are doing Web and UI work. We're going to look up doing proper web exporting at the end of this video series, look at exporting the VR section on exporting for web. But while we're here in all the type stuff, is with that layer selected, you can go to 'Layer', there's one that says 'Copy CSS'. Not SVG, I want to go to the one that says 'Copy CSS'. This is a nice easy way, you could paste this into an email, and explain to your designer or developer that it's this font size, it's that font family, there's the color, it gives them more the kind of code to make sure that your mockup matches what they build in the website. There's some bits you don't need, if you're not a web designer that's fine. Just send them all of this. If you're a web designer you'll realize you only need a couple of those things. Even makes a class based on the name here. So if you name your layers right you can name your classes. Anyway, if you are keen on Web Design, or getting into it, Dreamweaver might be your go, and I've got a course for that. Shameless self promotion. 

The second little tip I've got written here is Drop Shadows, and you're like, "I know what a Drop Shadow is." I just want to show you a weird little thing you can do with Drop Shadow. Say I want this text here to have a Drop Shadow. So with the 'Layer' selected, 'fx', 'Drop Shadow'. What you can do is, say you like that Drop Shadow, but it needs another one. You can actually hit '+' and have two Drop Shadows, which is crazy. Maybe not crazy, but it's useful. So the one at the bottom here, I'm going to actually make bigger. Terrible. Let's go that way. Let's go to Distance out a little bit. I'm going to turn the Opacity down a bit. Can you see what I'm doing here? I've added two shadows, so let's turn the Eyeball 'off'. There's one that's really tight around the outside, just to give it the fullness on the left. And then this other one, that's kind of more wafty, that will help it kind of lift out of the document. We're getting into the weirds here. 

One last little feature before we go is Font Pairing. If you're not doing Type all the time, even if you are, me, I stick with the same fonts. You look at anything that I've designed lately? It's probably Lust, and it's probably either Museo Rounded for the Type, or it is Roboto. So to get out of that, I need it for a client, or another concept, there's a term called Font Pairing. It's not really a feature in here, it's just something you can go and do. I'll show you what I mean. So all I did is, I went to Google, and I type 'typekit font pairings'. And I just clicked on the first three results, because what's happened is, designers better than me, Carriedils has spent some time going through and matching fonts for headings and body copy. And you just kind of go through and go, "Oh, I like that combination," and then work out what it is. This font is actually just the same font, just in different things; so sexy. 

Other ones, this one I end up at quite a bit, typ.io/libraries/typekit. And you can just see, it's just like-- I find this is nicer, you can see, actually used in design work with colors. And you can see here, this one here is using these two fonts. Another one here, these two fonts. These two fonts are some really nice font pairing matches, that you can go to now, 'Typekit', download, so you can get the same kind of effect. Another one here, justmytype.co, there's a bunch of font pairings. There's a load of font pairings in here. Click on 'Typekit', there's a load of font pairings here too. Don't stop there though, do a Google image search for font pairing typekit. So you can get the old creative type combination juices flowing. 

So that's it for advanced type tricks and workflows. Don't go away, in the next video we're going to do slightly more Type. It's just to do with matching fonts, let's jump into there now.