Installing new fonts into Word 2016 from Google 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.
Hi, in this video we're going to look at downloading and installing a new font to use. It's just going to be this guy at the top here we're using for our brand heading. So, let's go and look at where we can download them, and how to install them.
First up, where can we get our fonts? Now, you can pay for fonts; the best place if you want to buy a font is some place called myfonts. Now, if you've got a font you need, your client uses it, or you need to buy another license, this is where you go for paid fonts, it's called myfonts.com. There's lots of places you can buy fonts from, but this is probably the best and the most common at least.
What I really like about the site is that, if you're looking for a new font, they have a really good-- Like, sometimes you look at a font, and you're like, "Ugh, is that any good?" but it's not until-- say this font here, I'm not too sure about it-- It's not until you actually see it laid up before you’re like, "Actually that is a really cool font." So, I love that site for this type of thing, you might see, there is the font there, you use this part of other fonts, this part of imagery, it's really quite cool.
So, myfont is where you go to buy them. Let's say, you got no budget, and like everyone does, and you got to get some free fonts, so there's couple of places, 1001freefonts is one of them, darkfont is another, those are probably the most common, the ones that I like the least, mainly because there's lots of junk there, there’s just lots of stuff here you're never going to use. There's fonts shaped like cactuses, or-- This is all sorts of random stuff.
I'd like to jump to one of these two; fontsquirrel is a really nice one, it's nicely curated, there's no junk there, they also have nice explanations, showing you versions of it before you download it. Probably the hidden gem of buying fonts over getting free fonts is Google, so fonts.google.com is a really good site for getting fonts. We'll use this one, the technique is the same for lots of them.
So, what you can do is-- say you're looking for a font, and it's for 'Bring Your Own Laptop', you can go into here and just start typing. Watch this, I can say-- Actually I want to know what this one actually looks like, so 'Bring Your-- see, you can see it before you can actually download it. Sometimes you see a font, and it looks cool, and a little explanation, but when you type in your details, it might look naff. I don't like that font.
What we're going to do is, we're going to go through and pick our font. I've already had a little look through, and up here on the right, I'm searching, I’m going to use ‘Scope’, I like this one here, 'Scope One', and I'm going to click on it. You can decide-- you can see different things, but eventually what you want to do is go to this one that says 'Select This Font'. You can either do it in here, or you can go back and you can click this little '+' button in the corner there, and it adds it to this little group down here.
So, set into this little group, and the-- it's going to be useful web stuff, but the cool thing about Google fonts is you can download them to your system and use them for all sorts of things. You want to click this little arrow here, click on him, it's going to download a folder. I'm going to put this in your exercise files, I'll put it into '02 Newsletter', and I'll stick it in here for you so you don't have to download it if you want to use it.
Sometimes, if you're working in a company, sometimes they don't like you downloading stuff. What happens is, it comes down in this little zip file. I'm going to double click it to open it, and there he is there, 'ScopeOne-Regular'. You can double click him, and we're going to click, and install. I'm going to add it. Cool, And that is installed. Now, if you've downloaded from fontsquirrel or 1001freefonts, it does the same, you get a zip file, you open it up, you’ll double click to install them.
This font has only one white, this one here, regular, but you might have a bold, or italics. You might have to install a few different ones rather than just the one like we did. I close this down, and hopefully now, if I jump back into my Word document-- I can go up to here to my heading here, and I can decide, you now are going to be at 'Home', drop this down, and what I might have to do is just type it in here. 'Scope One', there he is. Nice! And I'm going to increase the font size for my heading. How big? Something like that. So that is how to download and install a new font from any of the online options, and start using it in your Word document.
Before we go I'm just going to kind of tidy up the fonts. I want to use this. I would like to use my color that we installed earlier, my green, there he is there, click on him. I'll make this a little bigger. Cool shortcut for making fonts bigger, obviously you can use this, and it's pretty cool, but if you have it selected, you can use 'Control Shift', hold both of those down on your keyboard, and hit the full stop key. And the comma key makes this more. So often that's quite a quick easy way to go and do it.
In terms of my body cover font, I'm going to leave it as 'Calibri'. Actually what I want to do is, I’m going to switch it to 'Arial', just because a lot of people have their corporate fonts as Arial. I do not like it, just that plain. So that's going to be my fonts that I'm going to use in here, and I might use the 'Bold' version, along the top for my newsletter, and for my actual body copy here, what I'm going to do is--
Font sizes, if you are looking at a magazine, any magazine, pretty much, like 99% of them are set to '10' points. Majority of the world can read it, it's a really common body copy size. Earlier versions of Word set default to 12, the newer versions sets it to 11. I think that's still too big. Really depends on your client; if you're dealing with the elderly or the visually impaired, you're going to have a font size, maybe 12 was a better size for you, but 10 is what works for me. Yes, 10 works for me. Print it off, check. It looks a little small on screen here, but print it off and check it, just to get an idea because it might be looking okay.
The other things is that, this text, as you can see, it's just mixed up Latin, it's not broken, it's just place holder text, because we're designing more of a template here, not actual content. Unfortunately the dynamic spelling checker is going crazy, little red lines everywhere. So what we're going to do is, just to save all that, because it looks ugly, for me. To remove it, jump up to 'File', go down to 'Options’, and then, under 'Proofing', there's this one here that says 'Check spelling as you type'. Just gets rid of the red wavy lines. We can just spell check at the end, we'll go to it all in the end once we’ve got a copy in there, but now, it looks pretty.
So that's it for this tutorial. Next video, we're going to look at setting the stuff as the default. That would be awesome, right? Let's go do that now.