Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to tell you how to make
a custom bullet point that you can use in InDesign.
And we'll do this with Fontself or Fontello.
Basically, you have to create a font in order to do this.
And you're probably thinking, 'Well, why not just copy and paste vector artwork into InDesign
as your bullet point?' and you can absolutely do this.
But if you have about 100 bullet points throughout your document, you might want to rethink that
because, if your boss says, 'Well, let's just change this bullet point to something else.'
If you set that up as a bullet point instead of just a copy/paste image, you can do that
all at once.
You don't have to copy and paste a million times to get all those bullets back in there.
All right, so let's get started.
All right, so here we are in InDesign.
And here's the section where I want to add some bullet points.
I'd like them to be here and here.
So to do this, I'm going to go to an Illustrator document.
And I'm thinking about this icon for the bullet point.
But I also might want to try this later.
So I'm going to create a font that has both of these characters.
So, the first thing we'll want to do is make sure that your character is set up as only
a fill and stroke, and it's a compound path.
And it also needs to be black.
So, as you can see, I've only got a stroke here.
I'm going to expand with CMD E, and hit 'OK'.
You can also go up here to Object>Expand.
OK, so now we have only a fill and everything is connected.
If it's not, go to your Pathfinder and choose the 'Unite' shape mode.
After you're done with that, then hit CMD 8 for Compound Path.
You can also go to Object>Compound Path>Make.
OK, and then the last thing we want to do is make it black.
So I'm going to hit D. That'll give me a white fill and black outline.
And then I'll hit SHIFT X to switch those.
So I'll only have a black fill and a white outline.
Hit X to bring the white to the front and then slash to clear it.
Now, you might think that's the long way around.
It's actually much faster if you can get those keyboard shortcuts down.
OK, and I'll do the same thing to this icon over here.
I'm going to hit CMD E, Pathfinder, 'Unite' if we need it, CMD 8 to make it a Compound
Path, then I'll hit I to get to my Eyedropper Tool and click the black over here to make
it black.
OK, so we have our two characters.
I'm going to CMD minus.
Now, if we are using Fontself, this is a very easy process to turn these into a font.
Fontself actually costs about $50.
So I can understand if you don't want to buy that, but it does make life very easy.
If you already want to create fonts that might be the way to go.
If you're not into creating fonts and you don't want to spend the $50, I'm also going
to show you a way to use Fontello, which is a free version.
And if you want to skip to that section of the video, here's the timestamp.
If you do want to get Fontself, and you've been thinking about getting font making software
anyway, I do have a 10% off coupon in my description.
That's a referral link.
So I would get a bit of money also if you were to purchase that.
All right, I'll show you how to do this with Fontself.
We just go to Window>Extensions>Fontself Maker.
Then we go to 'New', 'New Font', and then we'll just drag these and pull them in here.
We'll go down here to 'Any Character', and we'll assign O to this one and maybe the > to
this one.
So now we'll save our font by coming up here.
And I'll call this 'Bullets2'.
Say 'OK', and we'll put it on the desktop.
We'll save it.
Then we'll come down to our finder and open that document.
I'm going to CMD O to open, and we'll install the font.
All right, now I'm going to show you how to use Fontello to create icons.
First come over here to fontello.com.
I have some icons that I've used before.
I'm just going to clear those.
And now it just says to drag custom SVG icons or SVG font here.
So let's go back to our Illustrator file.
And we need to have these both on their own artboard.
So I'm going to hit SHIFT O to get to my Artboard Tool, and we'll make this 300 by 300.
And I'm going to add another artboard the same size by going to my Artboards window
and clicking the 'New Artboard' button.
Now we'll select both of these and hold SHIFT and resize them to the size of our artboards
almost.
We'll make this one a little bit bigger.
You want to get pretty close to the edge.
I'm going to center them on the artboard by going to the Align window, making sure I have
'Align to Artboard' set right here, and then aligning it this way.
And same with the arrow.
So now we have two icons on separate artboards.
I'm going to go to File>Export As and choose SVG.
And we will 'Use Artboards'.
Now I'm just going to save these on the desktop as icons.
We'll say, 'OK.'
I'll go to my desktop.
I'll grab those two icons, and I'll pull them onto this gray area that says to drag them
here, and we'll get a little error here if the image doesn't look as it should.
Just convert to compound paths, which we already did that, and so they look pretty good.
So now I'm going to select both of these by holding SHIFT and 'Download webfont.'
It'll download probably in your Downloads section.
And you'll need to unzip the zip file if you're on a PC.
That's a right click and then 'Extract'.
If you're on a Mac, you can just CMD O. And then inside there, you'll see a TTF file,
and that's the one you want.
So now you can just double click on it and install.
All right, let's go back to InDesign now.
I'm going to highlight all of these words, and I'm going to start a new paragraph style.
We'll call this one 'Bullets'.
Then we'll come down here to 'Bullets and Numbering'.
From List Type, we'll choose 'Bullets'.
And then we can add our bullet.
Now you'll have to remember the name of your font but mine was Bullets2.
And then I'm just going to hit tab so they show up.
And now we can choose the bullet we want.
And we'll add that and we might as well add the other one.
And we'll say 'OK'.
So now you can see them in your bullet list.
Now I'm just going to choose this one.
We'll say 'OK'.
And now you can see that they're in the document.
I'm going to double click and make some changes to this bullet.
I don't think I need that tab to be so far over.
So I'll get those right up next to it.
And we'll say 'OK'.
Now if we wanted to change the color of our bullet, we can go to 'Character Styles', and
create a new character style.
I'm going to make it this red color.
So we'll call this 'Bullet color'.
And now when we go back to our paragraph style and choose bullets, double click, we can come
down to 'Bullets and Numbering', and then choose that character style like this.
We'll say 'OK', and now they're all that color.
Now anytime you want to make changes, let's say you want to change that color.
Go back to your 'Character Styles', double click on 'Bullet color', go to 'Character
Color', and then we'll change it to green.
And we'll say 'OK'.
It will update every single one of the bullets that are using that style in your entire document.
And that saves so much time.
OK, that's my video for this week.
If you liked it, please click on the 'Like' button.
And I'll see you next week with another graphic design tutorial.
Thank you!!!