eSigning Tex Made Easy

Design text

How's it going everyone, welcome back to another Spoon Graphics video tutorial. Today's video is all about custom type in Adobe Illustrator. Now I have to admit I'm a bit of a noob when a comes to hand lettering, so in this tutorial I'm going to share some secrets on how you can still create cool looking typography by customising ready-made fonts. Once I've brushed up on my hand lettering skills enough to be able to draw out custom type from scratch I'll make a video on scanning and vectorising your artwork, but today I'll show you how us mere mortals can make use of the high quality fonts with OpenType features that have been made by the typographic gods. The tutorial will then continue with some customisation of the type to add shadows, offset accents and highlights to create a bright and colourful typography designs. So begin by opening up Adobe Illustrator and create a new document. I'm using a generic A4 layout but with the document rulers set to pixels. I always like to go to View > Hide Artboards to give myself a large workspace to play with. Since we're going to use ready-made fonts in this tutorial, we need to find a suitable typeface to work with. Now chances are you're going to have to spend some money here because the majority of free fonts available on the web just don't come packed with the OpenType features we're looking for. If you've ever bought any of the bundles I've recommended in my newsletters, chances are you'll have the font I'm using plus many others in your collection already. Otherwise you can pick up Bonbon, which is the script font I'm using in this video, from the link in the description. What these premium fonts have over the typical free font is a range of OpenType features. These are alternative characters for each letter that often include variations with ligatures or swashes. They allow you to put together unique typographic designs that disguise the fact that it's made using a font, rather than being a handmade piece. Type out your chosen wording and set the font with the Type tool and scale it to a suitable size. Open up the OpenType panel to find the settings for these special features and play around with them to see the various styles available. When working on logos or typographic designs, it's sometimes worth duplicating your text and applying the different settings to each one so you can easily compare the letters. So the first one is plain with no OpenType effects, the second adds Contextual Alternates, the next one is all Swashes and so on. Make another copy of the text that you'll use as your final design, then pick and choose your favourite letter styles and replicate the settings on each character. Here I'm using a Stylistic Alternate for the letter H, contextual letters S and T so they flow nicely, then the Tilting Alternate for the letter...