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Adobe InDesign CC – Advanced Training

Where To Get Great Free Fonts For Use In InDesign

Daniel Walter Scott || VIDEO: 6 of 74

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So we've already looked at Typekit. So we're asked, where do you get great fonts from? Fontsquirrel is a nice place but my favorite place, where not all people have heard of, is Google Fonts. So fonts.google.com. You come into here. You can do the same thing as before, you can delete this, and say 'Spring Sale'. And it will give you a bit of a demo of it.

Now, just like Typekit, you can decide I only want to look at Display fonts. You can see there, the Abril Fatface is a lot like Lust. The font that I want is Roboto. It's a really common body copy font. That, Source Sans, and Open Sans are probably the most commonly used at the moment. But it's a bit nicer than say Arial or Helvetica. Some of you might be gasping at the Helvetica comment but Roboto is quite nice. I'm going to type in Roboto. And I'm going to download it to--

So I want the Roboto, just the regular one. I'll hit '+'. And I want the Roboto Slab, it's kind of a nice chunky one, and click this. So what this is meant to be used for is for website fonts, but there isn't a cool option that not many people know about. If I click on this 'Families Selected' first of all, it will look like this, click on 'Customize' and you can go, say, I want the Slab, I want all three sizes, please. And for Roboto, you can go through, and just tick them all. I want all of these guys to use. Clickety click. And once you've got them all at the top here there's this little mysterious button. It's the download button, click on this and it would just download those fonts to use on your computer. They are TrueType fonts, not OpenType fonts.

We looked at OpenType fonts earlier, right? OpenType has extra awesomeness. So these are just regular TrueType fonts but in this case, Roboto's going to be really good for us. Now, if you don't have access to download them they are in your exercise files. Where are they? There they are. 'Exercise Files', in '01 Spring Flyer', 'Roboto', you can just open them up. See these TrueType fonts, you just double click on each of them. Actually you can click on all of them, and double click them all at once. And they'll install. It's the same thing on a PC, just double click any of those fonts and they'll install, and I'll be ready to go in InDesign, no need to restart it.

So Roboto's going to be the font we use throughout this course. You can totally use any font you like. You even have Helvetica, but I thought Google fonts would be a good mention. One of the perk for using Google Fonts over other fonts is that if you do design a brand, and it's going to be used on a website, if you use Google Fonts it's going to be easy to have that font on their website as well as their printed material, so it's kind of like a dual use, whereas fonts through TypeKit, some of them, not all of them need to be licensed specifically and separately for use on websites.

So before we go, let's go and use our Roboto in InDesign. I'm going to grab the Rectangle tool and draw a box that sits over here. I'll get it so it actually lines up. My Color panel here, I'm just going to drop down so it's more of a dark grayish. And I'm going to grab the Type tool. I click and drag the box down here. Paste in my text, select it all, make sure it's Roboto. Move it up here. And I'm going to have to use Roboto, probably the Bold version, so it can be seen, like kind of tease and cease. Font selected, I'm going to use 'Paper'. And I'm probably going to make it all caps, this double tease at the top here. Black Arrow. All the way down, I like it in Bold. You can carry on now to the next video. I am going to go and play with fonts, decide on sizes.

You my friend, meet me in the next video for some more font amazing stuff. See you there.