Hi everyone, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to tell you about
Fontself.
Fontself is a font making software.
And a long time ago, whenever you used to want to make your own fonts, you had to pay
a lot of money.
I'm talking like $600 to $3,000 to buy font software so that you could make your own fonts.
But now Fontself, the software, you can buy it for only $50.
And if you use my referral link, which is in the description below, you can get 10%
off, and I also get $5.
So everyone wins.
Yay.
But I wanted to let you know that it is not free font making software.
Also, there are two versions: An Illustrator version and a Photoshop version of Fontself.
And I'm only going to talk about the Illustrator version, so if you're looking for the Photoshop
version of how to use the software, I do plan on doing another tutorial on how to do that,
but today is Illustrator only.
So let's get started.
OK, so the first thing you'll need to do is actually go and buy Fontself.
You can do that through the link in the description if you want to save 10%.
Or if for some reason you want to just go the normal route, you can get there by just
typing Fontself into Google.
And here it is.
It's the first link.
So we'll go in here.
And then we'll come right down here and go to 'Get It Now'.
And the Fontself Maker is $50 for the Illustrator version, and also $50 for the Photoshop version.
And then if you want to buy them together, it's $80.
So I really recommend the Illustrator version.
Fonts are usually a vector format.
Illustrator has the most vector capability.
So I always recommend Illustrator, but if you like working in Photoshop, there's also
that option.
Okay, so we'll go to 'Buy Now'.
And then you just fill out all your information, and click 'Next,' and then you'll get a download
link.
So once you get that download link, it'll show up in your downloads, and then you can
just CMD O with the dmg file, and it will open it.
Then you can just double click right here on this icon.
And then it'll walk you through how to do this.
Just say, 'continue', 'continue' and accept all of the agreements and everything, and
it will install just like any other program.
Then you might have to close Illustrator and then get back in.
But once you're in Illustrator, go to Window>Extensions, and it should be over here.
If it's not, I would even try restarting your computer because it should be in there at
that point.
OK, so now I'm going to go ahead and walk you through how to create a font with this.
I've already created a font down here.
It's a super scary Halloween one.
With Fontself, you can create color fonts, which is really awesome.
But you cannot change the color in its font form, if that makes sense.
So when you go and type and...let's say you wanted to change this to red and this is a
color font.
Doing that would not work.
It would just stay the orange and black like you see here.
So that is one limitation of a color font.
Color fonts also only work in some programs like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.
They probably aren't going to work in Word or PowerPoint or any of those nongraphics
programs.
So I wouldn't try to sell color fonts out there on Etsy or out there on like Creative
Market or anything, because a lot of the people who open those and buy those will not be able
to use them.
So if you're wanting to sell these fonts, I would just make a black font, like a normal
font.
The way you have to set up your file in Illustrator is, you need to have everything in a long
line like this.
And everything needs to be either a compound path or a group or a shape.
So I'm going to select my A and, as you can see, it's grouped with a lot of other letters.
So I'm going to hit my G tool... that is your Group Selection tool, and you can set that
up in keyboard shortcuts.
So we're going to select the A, and then CMD X, paste in front, which is CMD F, and then
group it, CMD G, and then hide it, CMD 3.
And we'll keep doing that with all of these letters.
Each letter should be its own group.
I'm going to go ahead and do that to all the rest of the letters, so you don't have to
sit through it.
OK, so now we'll have... now we should have 26 uppercase letters.
And I'm going to bring up Fontself now by going to Window>Extensions>Fontself.
And now we can just take those letters and drag them right here, and it will give me
the option of dropping it on either of these two or also this batch down here.
And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute.
But we have an uppercase alphabet so I'm just going to drop these here.
This is something that might show up for you.
Four objects in your selection contain too many points.
So you have to get rid of a few of the points.
Otherwise it'll freak Fontself Maker out.
And it looks like it's the C, the O, the Q and the U, so we'll say 'OK.'
Now I'm going to X out and go and fix this problem by highlighting the C.
We'll go to Object>Path>Simplify.
And I'm going to hit 'Preview', and this is obviously really messing up my C. I want the
curve precision to be a lot more precise than that.
Still, maybe, I might go with 99% and see if that fixes it.
We'll say 'OK.'
It did fix it.
So I'm going to go ahead and do that with the other three shapes and then try again.
And this time it's working.
OK, and now everything has been loaded into Fontself Maker,and you can see that the A
is down here underneath the A, and they are all matched up.
If for some reason they're out of order, you can always type the correct letter in there.
OK, and now I want to get this spider.
I'm going to make it a glyph.
So I'm going to grab him and just pull him on here too.
And we'll go down here to Any Character or (Batch).
So now I've got the spider loaded into my font.
We'll make this the number one.
And now you can see him up there.
I'm going to double click.
If we want to vertically center him with the rest of the letters, we can do that.
All you have to do is just double click in like this, and then move him around.
And now we're ready to export.
Obviously, this font doesn't have any lowercase letters or numbers but it's the same process.
You just grab the next 26 letters, the lowercase, and then just pull them right onto here.
Or you can grab your spider or whatever and pull it onto batch.
But we are ready to go.
I'm going to export this.
So to do that, I'm just going to go up here to 'Save,' and you can name your font anything
you want.
So I'm going to name it Halloween Spider and say, 'OK'.
Now it's going to ask me where I want to save that, and it always saves as an OTF file,
which is fine for both PC and Mac.
So we'll say 'Save'.
Alright, and then down here it says, 'Do you want to open your saved font?'and I do.
All right, there it is.
And now I'm going to install it.
And as you can see, there are a lot of missing letters in there and that's just fine.
Now I'm going to X out of the Fontself Maker and just click once to type.
And I'll turn my Caps Lock on because this is an uppercase font.
We'll just say one, Halloween one.
I'm going to increase this, and it does a pretty good job of making them the right point
size.
That's really nice.
You can see it came right up and it put a spider at the beginning and the end because
that's what the number one will do.
So if I wanted a lot of spiders, I could just type a lot of number ones.
So that's pretty much it.
It's pretty easy to make your own color fonts with Illustrator and Fontself.
Well, now that you know how easy it is to use Fontself Maker, I hope you're inspired
to create some fonts of your own.
If you liked this video, please click on the 'Like' button.
And I'll see you next week for another graphic design tutorial.
Thanks!!!