Advanced fonts tricks & tips in Adobe Illustrator CC

Okay, so we're in the Typography section and we're going to do lots of tips and tricks in this video. Lots of little stuff that will help your work flow. Let's start with-- we'll open up the Characters panel, just because. We can use one over here on the side, but it's maybe just easier for the moment to have a separate panel. So what I'm looking to do is, this font up the top here, I want to change. Some of the nice things you can do is, up the top here, when I drop down there are some Filters along the top here. I want to change it to something like, maybe a Slab Serif. So what it's going to do is, somehow magically it knows all the fonts in here that are Slab Serifs. So just really easy to cut these things down. Say I want to use a hand written font, you can see, I'm just hovering above it, and it's updating on the left there. Super handy. Make sure you turn it off otherwise it stays on forever and it looks like you don't have too many fonts. 

Favorites is a good one. Say you are mixing with fonts, lots kind of playing around with brands, and trying to look for fonts, but these are few that you use all the time. You just star them. So Museo, I use a lot, let's say we use Lust. So what you can do is you can come into here and kind of go into the drop down, and just click on this option. Just lists your favorites. So just a quick way rather than scroll. Depending on how many fonts you have. 

Another handy one, Find Similar is a handy one as well. For some reason Museo doesn't work, right? So I'm going to change this into Lust. So I'm using Lust, right? It's a nice big display font, but I want to find something else. I've used it too much, or I just want to find something different. Click on this, there's an option here, this little wavy line, it says 'Apply Similar Filter'. I want you to go and find similar fonts to Lust, and you can see here. Pretty cool, huh! It's got some-- Where was that one? That one. No, you're not allowed to use curls, that's banned, but there are some good ones in here that are pretty close. So that's quite – it doesn't work for all of them. If I click on this guy, Museo, and click on similar it goes, can't find anything. So, it doesn't 100% work. 

The next thing is TypeKit. If you're not using it already, drop down, you have to have a paid Creative Cloud subscriber account. Click 'Add Fonts from Typekit'. I won't cover this too much because you're probably already using it, if you're not, you probably can't. I always click 'Browse' at the top here, login with your Adobe ID. "I love you." Let's say I'm going to put my name in there. The cool thing about it is you can decide on what kind of fonts you're looking for. And because it's part of your Creative Cloud subscription it allows you to download these guys for free. It's really easy to do, say you like this one here, you click on it. You click 'Sync All'. And kick back, relax. And Cortado should appear in Illustrator in a sec. Can you see at the top there, there he is there. So now I can say 'Cortado', there he is there. I quite like him. 

Now what I find quite handy is, well up here, I want to search by this because this is the ones I've gone through and pulled from Typekit. So it's often the stuff I've kind of really spent time trying to find. Those are the filters, let's turn them all off, they stay on. So you got to remember to turn them off when you're finished. 

The next thing to look at is to do with Open Type fonts and their Ligatures. There are some fonts in here that have, can you see, TK and O, those are good fonts. Those are both Open Type fonts, the Typekit ones, or the ones that say O. The ones that are not so good are these TT ones. These old school True Type fonts. The reason for the difference, sometimes you've got on your machine, like two of the same font and you're like, "Why do I have Lust and Lust?" Lust MT, or something else, Lust Pro. Often it's to do with the Ligatures and Glyphs that come along with the font. What I mean by that is, this font was designed by a wonderful Type designer. I love this font. But let's say I want to look at—

I don't like the way their X is, it's a bit flowery for me. I'm going to duplicate that a few times. What I'd like to do is, because this is an Open Type font or a Typekit font, TK or O, what I can do is, I can highlight a letter and you can see down the bottom here, there's alternatives. The Type Designer, Typographer, Fontographer, not sure of the word, they've decided, he or she has decided that they've got kind of two options. That's true of lot of the letters, select on it and there's a big flowery fashion there. There's actually two versions of this O I might choose to use. It's a nice way of building up kind of complex looking things, you're not happy to do the Curvature Tool, or the Width Tool. You can see them better. 

Say the designer has decided that-- they call them Stylistic Sets. So they've designed it with all these flowers, all those florescence. And what you can do is, with it selected we're going to go to this Open Type. If you can't find that, it's under 'Window', 'Type', 'Open Type'. Now what I want to do is, down the bottom here, there's this one called-- so this is the Set 1. You can see, there's the same. So that's what the designer decided is the kind of first option. Second option, Set 2 has all these curly bits. Set 3 has some kind of coming back across. This one here, 4. 4 looks the same as everything else. 5, I'm just going through them all. They often, if it's an Open Type font or Typekit font, there is Stylistic Sets. You'll find just kind of some extra Glyphs and Ligatures to use. You can copy and paste them from each to kind of build up something quite nice. 

Another new feature is, it's been used around for a while but it's just-- somebody uses Body Copy here, there's variable fonts, which is kind of crazy, right? There's only a few of them available at the moment. Illustrator has included a couple in this version. This is CC 2018. If I drop this down, there's this chunk in here. Can you see, it says 'VA', so it is Open Type variables. And pick-- there's not many to pick from. So we're going to pick from, I'm going to use Acumin, because it has lots of things, so click on that. Now what's going to happen is, nothing, except you see this little option here, 'Variable font', click on that. And this magic happen. So, watch this. Somehow, watch this dragging, keep an eye on it, let's move this up here. Watch this, you, Weight. It just magically gets bigger. 

So it's not just like adding a Stroke around the outside. The designer's made some really kind of stylistic choices on how things grow, where they grow. So Weight, same with Width. It's pretty amazing that you can just go, actually I want the-- instead of condensed or compressed you can just kind of find some kind of happy medium for what you need. Same with the Slant. Pretty cool, heh! There's not many fonts that are built into Illustrator. There are more you can go and buy, and use if you need that kind of flexibility. Not all of them have the full-- I picked that one as an example because that has Weight, Width, and Slant. Some of them, let's say, like some of these variable ones, say Minion. And I click on this, it only has weight and optical size. So I'm going to choose the Weight. The Optical Size is kind of interesting. It's not really making it wider or bigger. It's just kind of like getting more volume. Some pretty cool stuff. 

All right my friends, that is my tips and tricks for Fonts and Type in Adobe Illustrator. Let's get on to some more Type things in this section. All right, see you in the next video.