From the course: Creating Fonts with Fontself, Illustrator, and Photoshop

A quick start in Illustrator

From the course: Creating Fonts with Fontself, Illustrator, and Photoshop

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A quick start in Illustrator

- [Instructor] Now, all of this talk of type and different things to do with typography can set your head swimming if you're not really used to it. And what I want to show you here in this file is a quick confidence builder to show you how easy it can be to create a font using Fontself. So in the file I've got here, I'm just going to add a baseline to these characters. I'm just going to hold down the Command key, that would be Ctrl on Windows, and tap R to get my rulers. And then from the rulers, I'm going to drag a guide down like so. And I've anchored that along the bottom of the L just there. And all of the little curves are just bouncing over the side of that. Okay, I'll zoom out so we can see everything just here. And the next thing I'm going to do is make sure my guides are unlocked, which they are currently. And as you can see, I'm using the Properties panel to check that. If you want, you could also do that from the View menu. If you go to Guides and make sure that it says lock guides there. That means they are unlocked. We'll then select everything I've got here and go and launch the extensions. So down to Extensions and Fontself Maker, and then I'm going to simply drag this in and over the batch there. When I do that you can see that straightaway, it creates me a font. Now it doesn't know what any of these characters are, and we'll get into that as we go along, but it's simply enough for me to just come along here and type the associated letters. Now just bear in mind when you get into this later on that if you are doing it this way around, you need to type the character exactly the same way as it appears here. So if it was lowercase, for example, then you would type a lowercase E. But from here, you've actually already built a font, okay? And you can see that things are changing up at the top here as I do this. And if I can think of something to type with just the letters I've got here, if I clear this preview area and let's type C-A-B, oops, I did it in lowercase. So there we go, try that in uppercase. And there you go. It's working. From here, I could actually save this out as a font file and install it, but it wouldn't be much use without filling in the characters. So through the course, you'll find out how to do that automatically much, much more. But you now know, it's not as difficult, at least on the surface, as it initially appears.

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