in today's video i'm going to show you how to manipulate fonts in adobe illustrator let's go
my name is alice thorpe and i like to create things today i'm going to show
you how to manipulate fonts and make them look however you want them to the creative
options are endless with this one and it's super easy once you know how to do it all you need is
adobe illustrator and your computer and we can get started let's take a quick look on pinterest so
here are some fonts that have been expertly manipulated now especially these top few this
kind of font is all over tik tok and instagram reels i see graphic designers doing this style
of font all the time and i've got to say i love it so i want to show you how to do that and also
how to manipulate fonts that are a little less swirly and girly and instead a little bit more
solid heavy fonts first step open up illustrator and type out whatever word you want to manipulate
i've done it twice so i have this one in helvetica new and then i also have this one in ddo i believe
these both are adobe fonts too if you want to download them for yourself
so straight up i am going to move one out of the way and we're going to focus on this one
so right now we have the type just in there as written so if i press the
type tool here i can delete and rewrite it if i want to so when text is in this form there's not
too much you can do to it of course you could use the touch type tool which allows you to manipulate
the tracking and the spacing and the sizing of all the letters individually let me quickly show you
if we click on a letter it has a box around it and from there we can change the width
we can change the width and the height we can change just the height we can also rotate it
and we can move it about so that's one way of manipulating fonts however if you want to have
even more freedom you can use the direct selection tool and in order to do that you need to create
outlines so two ways of doing this you can either right click on your font go down here and click
create outlines or you can go up into the menu at the top select type and again create outlines
when you do this it turns each letter into a vector let's try it there we go now if i zoom in
and i get rid of the fill color you will find that all the letters have been outlined in paths these
are now editable so let's try the direct selection tool you'll find it up here on the toolbar it's
the sort of cursor that's filled in you can either click that or you can press a on your keyboard and
you will you'll get it with the shortcut so if we zoom in i have my direct selection tool on
and i'm clicked onto the letter and you'll see in each corner there is a little square with a circle
on the side of it so because this is a sans-serif font where it's all straight lines quite blocky
quite modern looking it means that there aren't too many anchor points so it's a little more
simple to change so if we click on one of these anchor points you can see it's turned fully blue
and now if we click again and hold we can drag this around so if you wanted to create
some funky letters this is a pretty basic and easy way of manipulating those words so have a play
around with this you can also highlight a bunch of anchor points so i'm highlighting those top four
by just clicking and dragging if i let go all four of those are highlighted and now if i click onto
one of them and drag they will all move in unison so this is a really fun way of sort of tweaking
things slightly so let's say i wanted this m to be a little bit longer on the right hand side
highlight both of them drag it down perfect you can literally change and move whatever you like
it's completely up to you whilst we're here as well if i just zoom in you'll see that there
are some little circles in those corners these are little toggles that allow you to curve the corner
so if i click on one of them again highlights blue drag it down and it'll curve that corner there are
some options that come along with this if you want to tweak them and if you double click that
circle as well it brings up the corner panel and you can change how it looks so you could manually
type in a number press up or down you can round it more of a relative angle and you can also change
what the rounded shape looks like so this one isn't even round it's a nice straight edge another
way of manipulating fonts is using the pen tool now if you've used illustrator for a while you'll
be familiar with this if not you'll probably need a little bit of practice it took me a long time to
sort of get the hang of it but trust me when you do it's completely worth it you can do a lot with
the pen tool so the pen tool is up here and it is p on the keyboard for the keyboard shortcut and
with the pen tool you can draw your own shapes basically so if you click it creates an anchor
point those blue squares if you click again it will create another one so the more you click the
more anchor points you get now rather than just drawing straight lines all the time if you click
and then click and hold on to your button and drag it will bring up these handles so these
handles allow us to create curves so if i let go you'll see that it's filled it with black because
down here on the left hand side you'll see that the black fill is set to fill that made no sense
i'm just going to switch that to a line so you can see it but if we zoom in we have a nice
curved line so if you want to add any curved elements to your letters or if you want to
add a sort of flourish the pen tool is great for this you can also edit the pen tool so if you go
down to the anchor point tool i can click these handles here and tweak them to however i like
so let me just quickly show you an example of how you can use this on this font
and then we have a manipulated font this one like i said it's super basic straight sans very
fun i've kept the lines straight i didn't want to over complicate it but simply by using the
direct selection tool and clicking those anchor points i've been able to create a unique font
that i actually think looks really cool it reminds me sort of like the monster's ink font let me know
if you can picture that too now moving on to this serif font i'm going to show you how we can use
the pencil tool to also tweak and change this one now again we need to create outlines on this
so that we can fully customize it so right click create outlines or go up to type create outlines
so now you'll see that these are all outlined actually before we do that let me quickly hit
undo i want the tracking on this to actually be a little tighter so i'm going to go to character
and i'm going to go to this toggle and just hit the down button and squash everything together a
little bit you see everything's moved together so let's try again right click create outlines
and i am gonna manipulate these letters so with the pencil tool it's almost like a free-flowing
hand-drawn option rather than the pen tool is quite rigid you have to physically click
every time for it to create an anchor point the pencil tool is like a smooth pencil
that allows many anchor points more freedom but also it can be a little bit harder to control
so let's go into the pencil tool shortcut is n and if i just do a little demo up here if i click
and hold and do this little wiggly line you'll see if i let go it's created a bunch of anchor
points and all of those anchor points have curves on them so those handles we spoke about earlier
the pencil tool has done those automatically so you don't have to click and drag like you would
with the pen tool an issue with the pencil tool is it can be quite hard to create smooth lines like
if you particularly shaky handed or if you're trying to follow something or have a particular
vision it can get quite difficult but there's a way around this so if you do a little pencil
line like this and oh i've done an accidental bump didn't want that i'm gonna go back into the pencil
tool i'm gonna click and hold it and then just underneath is the smooth tool so this is where
we can have fun we can really refine these shapes so if i click the smooth tool and just simply
paint over this you'll see it starts to adjust things now this is sort of trial and error you
have to play around with it you might have to press undo sometimes but that's the basic
premise of the pencil tool and the smooth tool now let's see that in action so i think i am going to
join that p to the u so first up i need to ungroup so right click ungroup and then i'm
going to draw a little serif around either from here or from here and i'm going to join it up to
this part of the u so with a pencil tool i can just draw and sort of have a play around with
how i think that might connect if i make that line black you can see it working and i'm just
going to keep experimenting with this and seeing how it happens so let's give this another go
pencil tool maybe we do a little loop and then join it up here maybe that would work
or we do this and join it up like this now this is where we can really go in and refine things so i'm
going to zoom into that i quite like the shape of that and am going to go into the smooth tour
i feel like we've got a little bit too much going on with these anchor points so i'm just going to
run my pen over it and smooth it out you can see it got rid of anchor points
and now i'm going to tweak it so firstly let's go back to the direct selection tool which is a and
i'm going to move this anchor point so it sort of matches up a little better with the existing lines
i'm also going to move this toggle this handle a little bit and if i go up into this corner zoom in
i'm actually going to join this one up here and we're going to get rid of this straight part here
so in order to get rid i'm just going to click the selection tool which is v on your keyboard and i'm
going to actually get rid with the eraser shift e or this tool here i'm going to erase this part
so now i am going to play around and figure out how we can connect these in a smooth manner
okay so i'm pretty happy with that although there are some things i do want to change i want to play
around with the width of this stroke especially at this end where it joins the u so there is a tool
called the width tool now the width tool looks like it reminds me of a clown hat i don't know why
it looks like this it's shift w on your keyboard and the width tool allows you to manipulate the
width who'd have thought so as i drag my cursor over it you'll see that the little icon next to it
changed to a plus sign so if i go up here click and hold you'll see that the shapes are moving
so by doing that we can make small subtle changes to this line so when it's a plus tool it will
increase so you can really have some fun with this you can create a thicker area you can create a
thinner area and truly customize it to whatever it is that you have a vision for so i'm just going to
tweak this little bit slightly maybe back to the direct selection and balance this out a little bit
we've got a little bit of a bump there so i'm gonna pull that handle a touch and i'm pretty
happy with that so so we've gone from the pencil tool we've drawn a quick little squiggle we then
went into the smooth tool smoothed it all out got rid of any excess anchor points and now we've done
the width so it sort of fits the vibe we want to go for i'm pretty happy with this so what
i'm going to do is i'm going to create outlines on this too so this means i have now created a
shape as opposed to a line let me show you so if i go into object path and outline stroke
watch that line up here you see this blue line watch that outline stroke if i click that it's now
gone into a fully outlined shape so if again i change it to y you'll see there's a blue line
around both edges of that curve now with this it means i can go in and really refine those edges so
again a direct selection tool a on your keyboard and you can click and drag these individual
parts of the shape just another fun way of adjusting these curves and lines
to really really make this your own same applies up here so i can drag this
i'm going to make that a little thicker take this handle and there we go so if we zoom out
you'll see that we've added that little flick and actually when zooming out i think i want to make
this one a little bit thicker so let's go back in and i'm going to drag this anchor point out here
just a touch now i'm just going to quickly go through and add some some flair to this font
do
and then we have a manipulated font as you can see i've added a few little glyphs i could add
more i could change it i could do less you can really go to town and play around with it as much
as you like the whole point of adobe illustrator and designing things is for it to be fun
now before you go and export this you need to make sure it's saved correctly
so at the minute all these parts that i've added aren't connected at all so
we need to connect those and make sure they're correct so in order to do this i'm going to use
the pathfinder tool you'll find the pathfinder down here for me if you can't see it go on window
and then scroll down to pathfinder and make sure that's selected and in here there are various
options but the one we want to use today is this one which is unite so it creates a compound shape
basically it merges them all together it flattens it so if i show you an example with this little
bundle of letters zoom in you can see that there are three parts there are a the n and
this little add-on that i created now if i click this it will merge them all together you ready
just like that so what we do on a normal case because i know everything's prepped and ready
to go i would select the entire word like this you can see the overlaid parts if i press the
pathfinder it merges them all together and now they're all together and ready to go and there
we have it that is how you can easily manipulate fonts in adobe illustrator please let me know if
you try any of these things out and show me links send me to your instagram if you've done any of
this yourselves i'd love to see don't forget to subscribe if you aren't already for more creative
videos from me thank you very much for watching and i'll see you next time for another one bye
you