How to Make Your Font Shine in Adobe Illustrator in 10 Easy Steps

Creating Your Font in Adobe Illustrator

Making your font is something every single designer should think about doing. It’s a great practice, not to mention that it looks good on your resume. You can also use your unique font to help you in your future employment. You can use it in the unique designs you will be making, adding that personal touch.

It’s an excellent way to build attention to detail and have some fun in Adobe Illustrator.

Adobe Illustrator is an essential tool you never finish learning about. It’s expansive and vast, and exploring it in a constructive and fun way is a sure way to sharpen your skill set.

If you find it difficult to create your font, you can always choose to hire experts like the Back Office Pro Professionals. If you’ve decided to give this a shot, we salute you. We have compiled a short but comprehensive list of some of the most fabulous tips and tricks you should employ when making your own font.

Start Your Design

Starting is the most important thing when doing anything. A good start is a sure way to lay the basis of a right product. Before you do anything, you need to have an idea. Start your design process with a couple of different ideas and think about what works best for you.

When it comes to fonts, you need to define the baseline to define the guidelines later. Think about what works best for you and remember to test every single idea until you find the perfect fit.

Define Your Guidelines

Before you think about importing glyphs into your font, you need to name the guidelines. Naming them in numbers might work but will most likely wound up looking confusing. In Illustrator’s layer panel, you can observe the guidelines and rename them. Name the Capsheight (for the height of your caps) and remember to name the Baseline.

Add Shape to Your Font

The shape is the most defining feature of your font. Open the Fontself maker and select the upper and lower guide of your shape, including the shape itself.

Fontself Maker is a feature that is explicitly designed to assist you in the creation of your unique alphabetic font. It makes dragging numbers and letters into their comprehensive space an easy job. Don’t worry about defining your work at this moment. It’s a process best left for later.

Define the Shortcut

You need to associate the existing key on your keyboard to its adjacent virtual cousin. Your design is important, but it’s useless if it’s not associated properly. When the glyph marker appears on your design, you’ll need to select it and type in or select the key you want to associate it with.

Unite Your Glyphs

Say you are making a font that is military-styled, where every letter consists of disconnected lines. If you don’t unite the designs and their shapes, the Fontself Maker will treat them like two different designs.

Select all the parts of your letter or key and open the Pathfinder panel. On it, you’ll find a checkbox that says: “Unite.”

By checking this checkbox, you’re telling the program that the split parts are of the same key and should be treated as one single object. This will give you one glyph, which you can associate with the desired key.

Add Some More Glyphs

You can go on creating more and more shapes and assigning them to keys as you go along your way. Choose different but memorable keystrokes when you’re creating your font in order to speed up the process. There are a lot of keys on a keyboard, and you’ll need to save as much time as you possibly can.

Only One Color Allowed!

If you’re designing a font, you need to know about colors. Colors can have a great impact, and fonts are no exception. If you’re making a framed and boxed font that might require both black and white, it’s no problem, but doing it isn’t as easy as you might think.

If you add a two-color element to Fontself Maker, it will recognize it as a two-color element. This makes the program convert it into a colored font, which might not work on all devices. Ensure that you’re only using black, and remove the background where you want your whites to be.

Name Your Glyphs

You need to name all of your unique glyphs. While numbering them can be useful and quick, it can be confusing in the long run. Name your glyphs and name them accordingly.

Building Single Numbers

An alphabetic font is not only exclusive to letters, as numbers are also important! There is nothing that deters a person more than a font with bad numbers, so pay close attention to how they look and how they pair with the letters.

Kerning Number Pairs

If you’re making number pairs and adding them into your font, excellent. This is an excellent feature of some of the best fonts, but you need to know how to do it properly. Fontself Maker adds spacing between the glyphs, so you are going to see an unwanted gap between your number pair.

To go around this problem, click the advanced settings in your font self-maker. Type and connect each half of the number to the other, and you can see that the space between them is automatically set to 50, which is the industry standard.

When finishing up your project, you need to look back and marvel at what you’ve created. To perfect your near-perfect creation, you need to adjust and tone it. You can do so with OpenType and make it more marginalized according to other fonts.

Remember to look back on your work and refine it until you’re happy.

It’s not OCD! It’s attention to detail!

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