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Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

What is TypeKit used for in Adobe InDesign?

Daniel Walter Scott

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So let's work with some new fonts. I'm going down to page 3, go and grab the 'Type Tool'. Draw a nice big box in the center here. And we're going to call this one 'Healing Herbs'. Then I select it, and at the top here, I'm going to go to 'Character', and you'll drop this down, and you'll see, there's a bunch of fonts on your system. These are the ones that come by default on your machine. We're going to look at adding fonts from Typekit, and some other free stuff. Let's quickly look at free fonts, and then jump into Typekit.

There are lots of places to get free fonts. 1001 Free Fonts, DaFont, I find there are lots of tacky fonts, and crappy fonts in there. So I just jump to Font Squirrel. It's a great place for commercial use fonts that are free, you can go through here, and download them. Say this 'Alex Brush' here, I'm going to click download. I'm going to stick it on my 'Desktop', in my 'Class Files'. Click 'Save'. I'm going to open up that little zip file that it came with. Double click it, and it's given me this. The TTF files, the True Type Fonts, what you want. It might be an OTF file, or-- can't remember what that ones are, but double click it. And depending on your system, it will come up with 'Install Font', super easy. Both Mac, and PC.

Now, if I jump into InDesign, no need to restart. I can go up here, and say 'Alex'. There it is, 'Alex Brush'. And I can start using that font, I'm going to make it a lot bigger, maybe up to 40. And there's that font, commercial use, ready to go. Now, Font Squirrel and Free Fonts site, I like it. They often have really good heading fonts, but very poor body copy fonts. That's because body copy fonts just take a lot longer to make, because there's so many more nuances than just these big headings here.

In an earlier video, we looked at MyFonts where you can buy commercial fonts, but we're going to look at Typekit because Typekit is an actual paid for, commercial font library from Adobe, but because you've got a Creative Cloud license, or potentially you have, you get access to it for free, or at least as part of your subscription, so let's go and check that out.

Up the top here, the easiest way is to click this one that says 'Add Fonts from Typekit'. And it's going to actually open up a web browser. You can't do it from within InDesign. Let's go. So it's opening up here in my browser. If you are not logged in, you might have to log in with your Adobe user name and password. Mine's already logged in. I love this site, you can do some cool things. I'm going to go to this one that says 'My Library'. Actually let's go to 'All Families'. And 'Sample Text' thing is quite useful. So, say I want to do 'Healing Herbs', you can kind of see what it's going to look like before you download it, which is really handy. Play around with the size. So it's going to be something like that. And you can start working through the fonts.

A nice thing about Typekit as well, is over here, this classification. Now, all the fonts on my machine-- I've got hundreds of them, but they're all not grouped, so it's a bit of a pain to go through, and say I want to find a hand drawn font. So it's easy to come to Typekit, click on 'Hand', and you're going to find hand drawn fonts. And you can download them from here. Let's go to-- you can see, this one here, 'Slab Serif', nice, big, thick chunky one. You can also add extra little filters as well. You can say I want it for headings only. So it's going to kind of cut up to things mainly for paragraph text.

Down here is quite useful as well. Say you have really long headings, you can pick this width to be quite skinny so you can fit quite a lot of letters in a title. Or if you want a nice big, thick wide one, click on it again, and it just deselects all of them. If you want heavy weight, or a nice thin weight, contrast, it's height, there is all sorts of things. This one is quite useful, if you're picking up body copy font forever, for a company. I hate it when you get stuck with-- you get the font, but the numbers do this weird thing where they-- can you see down here, they all sit on the base line, which means this 4 dangles below, and the 6 is above. I want a font that also has all the numbers lining up. So it will not give me any issues later on. I'm going to deselect that.

Actually I've got some fonts we want to use. So I'm going to go in here, and up here, I'm going to search 'Typekit'. Let's download a couple of fonts for me. The first one I want is called 'Lust'. You can choose 'Lust' or 'Lust Script', with that more curly one, I'm going to use just the plain 'Lust'. Click on it, and there's an option here that says 'Sync All'. Click on that. Kick back, relax. And the nice thing about this is that actually Adobe is Creative Cloud's app, it's actually installing this for you. I'm going to click 'Close'.

Now if we jump in to InDesign and highlight the text, super simple. Lust. Here it is, I'm going to use 'Lust Italic'. I'm going to give it the mid green color. That's how you install fonts. We're going to go through now, and install a couple more. We're going to use 'Roboto'. I like Roboto. Now when you are picking fonts, often you'll use header fonts, something a little bit more exciting, like Lust. And then a body copy font. Obviously, Lust as a body copy font would be a terrible idea. So Roboto, great. I'm going to sync Roboto. I like Roboto because it is like Arial. Nice, simple, easy to read font, but it's a little more sophisticated, I feel.

And let's look at Roboto Slab. It's very similar. It's got these, what's called Slab Serifs. See this bottom of this q here, Serifs have little feet. So this is a Serif font, it's got the little feet down the bottom. Sans Serif, if you've ever heard that word, means without the little feet. So, Sans is without Serifs. And a Slab Serif just means a big, chunky, slabby one. Like old school university fonts. Now I already have this one synced so I don't have to click 'Sync All' again. It's all ready to go. As a little side note, Roboto is what Google uses for YouTube, or YouTube uses for YouTube. It's their font that they use for everything. It's quite a nice font, they use it well. Go and check out on how they use it, it you want to find combinations of Roboto being used nicely.

Now, one thing when it comes to using fonts, if you are really new, often some basic rules can help you. And the basic rules are, you pick two fonts, you pick a font that is a Serif font, and a Sans Serif font; A Sans Serif. These little things hanging off the edges here like little feet, are called Serif. So you have a Serif font that have these, and a Sans Serif font, is without them. Sans is Latin for without. Often that's a great way to get started. So just pick two fonts, I know we're picked three in this case. I've got some special use cases for it, but pick two fonts, one Serif, one Sans Serif.

If you pick two Serif fonts often, you can pick something like Times or Garamond together, they're not different enough to look different. They just look a bit messy or broken. So, you pick one with the feet, and without the feet, often, it doesn't really matter which one you use for the title, or the body copy, but the combination can look quite good. And from within those fonts, you can pick two weights.

So you've got kind of four uses. You've got your Serif font, Sans Serif font, and within those you can pick a light version, and a bold version. Or maybe just a regular version, and a bold version. So you got kind of four choices and they'll give you enough options to keep consistency through the document without using too many fonts, but also be able to break up content. Things like headings versus sub-headings versus body copy versus paragraphs versus captions, those types of things.

Now if you're still unsure how to put things together, which two to pick, you can just go into Google, and search for Typekit, and something like font combinations. Font pairings is another good word. And go to Images. And what it will do is, it will show you Typekit fonts that can be used together. Are all of them great? No. But you go through, and you say, actually-- I wish this was actually bigger so I can see it a bit better. But let's say this one here, this seems like a really good example of a Serif font for the title, and a Sans Serif for the body copy. So follow this link, figure out what they are, and you can download those ones. You can also see down here, this is the same font but with different weights. Those are good examples to show you we're not switching our fonts, we're just playing with two different weights. So that's using Adobe Typekit in InDesign.