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How to Use Type & Fonts in Adobe Illustrator to Design a Postcard

Hi there in this video, we're going to make this simple postcard. We're going to look at fonts that are installed on your machine and we're going to look at something called type kit which is fonts that adobe give you and we can download them for free and use them as part of our designs. Alright, let's go and learn how to do that now in illustrator. Okay, so let's make our postcard for our text to go on. I'm going to file new and we want a postcard size. Now there is under print. Um you can see view all presets and there's no postcard size in here. Under art and illustration. There is a precept for postcard. Okay? But if I click on it and switch it over here to say inches or millimeters. It's it's got a really weird ratio. Okay, not what I consider a traditional postcard. Maybe that's where in the world depends on what's traditional. I'm going to just put in 5.8 and 4.1, that's a kind of a really kind of standardized postcard size if it's in millimeters very similar. Um it's 148 by 105...

. Okay, I'm gonna go back two inches awesome. Everything I'm going to make sure it is landscape and let's click create. Alright, let's put in our background color. So just grab the rectangle tool, pick a fill color and I'm going to go to my color mixer and up the top here. I'm just gonna make sure I want RGB. Okay, you might be on C N Y K RGB. Let's go go on RGB for the moment. We're gonna look at color a little bit later on. Just kind of click through here and decide on a color. Gonna pick a bluish greeny color. Okay I'm gonna drag it across the whole thing. There you go. Awesome. I want no stroke. Okay so I'm going to go in here and go and no stroke, please don't worry too much about the color because we are going to go and change it in a future tutorial, I say that and I'm like it's too blue, okay a little bit more green. Alright. Um I also want a rectangle on this side. I wanna break it into three groups to two columns for the text and one on the left here for just I'm going to put an image in later on. Okay you would have seen that at the beginning there. So what I want to do is break it into three. The easiest way is to copy and paste this. So I've got two of them. Okay I'm gonna change this to a dark gray. I'm going to go back to my swatches and pick just the dark gray for the moment. Um This is gonna get switched out again so divided by three member, we can do the math and these are the width. I'm gonna break the link so that the height and width aren't joined and I'm going to say it like the width just in here and put a divide by which is a forward slash and I want to divide it by three, their return. Okay. And it's just divided into three. Cool. So I'm going to use two of these for my text and this is gonna be my image. What I'd like to do for the moment though is to lock the background. Okay, so layers, I'm going to call this layer background. All caps for no good reason. I'm gonna hit the little locking icon, new layer and this is going to be my type. All caps for no reason. Okay, so when you're adding type, there's two kind of types of type boxes, grab the type tool which is this capital T if you click once you've created what's called a point type box, don't worry about the names, basically the point type box is a box that just keeps on going, keeps on going forever and goes off the screen. Good for titles and logos and stuff. But when we want body copy, we need a different kind of tight box. So grab the type tool again and down here, kind of this lower part, we're gonna add some body copy. If I click hold and drag. Okay, so up here I just clicked once and I got a point type box. Okay? Whereas I click hold and drag down here. You can see you get a box that has, it's called an area. Type box. Kind of basically it does, it has that kind of an end to it and it snaps back around okay. And which is if I resize it now, it kind of, you know, expands contracts. Whereas this one here, if I try and expand and contract it, it's kind of a weird sort of function using a point type box, um there's gonna be times where you need to convert the two. So I'm going to delete that one. Is that say I draw, I click once for a title in here and I had some stuff and some stuff and what happens, let's say later on, I want to make this a lot bigger. So I'm going to go to my properties and I'm gonna make the font size a lot bigger. I want to break onto two lines. Right? So what you can do is you can change this by with my black arrow, see this little kind of circle on the side here, that's the kind of conversion tool. If you double click it, it changes it into a area type box. Like the bottom one here, nothing really looks like it changes. Except now when I drag the edge, can you see it snaps down into two lines or I could snap it down three lines if there's enough room. Okay, so that's what I want this box to be, I want it to be nice and big ish and we're going to add some actual type and look at fonts next. So at the top here, there's a bit of text we're gonna put in, we're going to say how to murder designer and we'll go, that's gonna be our tip number one. Okay, and how to murder designer is asking them to send, can you send it over as a word doc? I hate when that happens. And so there's that, this is just going to leave his body copy. Um is Lauren ipsum at the moment, let's say we don't have that yet. Lauren ipsum is just placeholder text. It's latin, their actual words that just mixed up so they make no sense. But um yeah, good as a placeholder until you get your text. So let's move him down. What we will do is we'll start on this one at the top here and look at fonts. First of all, I'm gonna change my fill to white. Okay, next thing I want to do is pick a font. So I'm going to drop this down and you know how to pick fonts. It's no big deal. So I'll add a little bit of extra next to it. And what I really like is these filters. So these are all the fonts that are on my computer. Okay, so um they've been installed and some previous life. Okay, so up here it says filter. This can be really handy because I'm looking for a serif font, which has those basically a serif font has the little feet that kind of look like times new roman. Okay. It has the little surfs on the edges here. Let's zoom in so I can give you bit of front murdering go back to font. Let's pick times just because if I zoom in. So ah, Sarah font has these little feet. Okay, these are called Sheriff's. This is a Sarah font. A sans serif font is this one here? Sands is without, so sans serif is without feet. This one has a okay, this one has no feet. So sarah font. Um, let's look at a font. I've gotten, I've gone through and had a little look about what I want to use already and what you can do at the top here is once you've picked Sarah, if you'll notice all your fonts are cut down to only serif fonts super handy. Okay, um, now the only trouble is next time you come back in, it's gonna have the same filtering on so you got to remember to probably turn it off after you've used it to go back to all classes of fonts, Sarah font and you just kind of scroll through and you can see my text updating on the side there. So it's best to have your text already drawn like we have so you can go through and just check it. I'm going to use, I can't remember where's minutes here. Goudy old style. I'm going to use the italic. Okay, that's the one I decided I want to use in terms of the font size. I'm probably going to use 12 point Okay. Just so you know, in terms of font sizes so the body copy down here, body copy our small body copy or the, if you open up pretty much any magazine in the shop, it's going to be 10 point. Okay. That's like super common. Font size is legible. It's readable, looks kind of big but this is a small postcard. Okay. We're, and the smallest you want to go is about eight point. Okay. That's kind of more business card size where you're just trying to squeeze lots of stuff in. Cool. So we're gonna have 10 points if you can read it. So that's that font. I'm gonna do the same here. I'm going to use the same font. So Gaudy, you might not have this one. You can go and pick your own. I'm gonna make sure it's white and um, I'm gonna move this down. I'm probably gonna play with that a little bit at the end. This point here, we're going to look at something called type kit. Okay. So um, Gaudi it's just something that happens to be on my machine already. Right. But what adobe do as part of your creative cloud license. Okay. As you get access to type kit and basically what it means is I can with any sort of font selected. I can drop down my character panel and go to this one that says add fonts from type kit and click on him. Okay. And it's going to open up a website. Already opened it up here and it will ask you to log in. Ok. Because you'll need a paid um, creative cloud license if you don't have one of this, it's not gonna work. Um, but basically what we wanna do is we want to go to browse which is this first option here and it's just fonts. Okay, now there's lots of places you can go for free fonts like duff font or 1000 and one free fonts. Those are, those are fine. But what you'll find is that there, I don't know. Mm hmm. If I need a font shaped like a cactus, I'll go to and one free fonts or just kind of like really fun. But I guess free and they don't have a lot of the stuff I need for maybe more professional work, glyphs and ligatures and like I live in Ireland. I'm from New Zealand. Both the Maori and irish languages have all the fathers and all that accented letters. Okay, so I need a more mature font. Something like type kit is perfect for it. The cool fonts and they're free. So what you can do at the top of it is you can type in, let's say, can I can you, I like doing this because before you download it, you can kind of see what it's gonna look like. Okay, sometimes it's paying, you kind of download one and then it doesn't look the same in the fonts you need to use it for. Okay, so in here you can also kind of wrangle the fonts into some, say you only want to look at kind of script fonts or say hand drawn fonts. Okay, so you can go through and just kind of work out which ones you want. And also I like is that I'm looking for headings. So I want to kind of a more of a bold handwriting fonts. I'm going to turn that off, hitting fonts and I turned it off. Another nice thing is in this case I want quite a narrow width because I want to fit a lot of text across the page. Um yeah, there's a few, a bunch of other options that you can have a little look through here. Now, the one I want, I've already had a little look through. So I'm going to kind of cheat and I'm going to go to League and where are you? L. E. A. There? You are League Gothic. That's the one I've decided I want to use already. Okay, so this is the font. Okay, um, now there's a few different weights. Okay, I'm just gonna say sink all and basically what that's gonna do is hopefully you can set up at the top right here, you'll see in a second that it's downloading onto my computer and magically for fonts aerated, it's that simple. Also noticed that I've Somehow I'm allowed 100, but I've got 323. I just don't ask questions. Somehow keep getting more fonts. So let's jump back into illustrator. Now, the cool thing about it is that it should already be installed. If I go to league, if I can spell league now, what am I have to do is I'm gonna have to turn the filtering of Seraphim because this is a sans serif font there. It is there installed and ready to go. It's that simple. There are professional fonts is that there's, you know, some really nice ones in there. And I'm going to usually Gothic. Just this one here, I'm gonna switch it to whites. Now, you can switch over to the next video because now I'm just going to play around with fonts and font sizes, I'll give you some tricks. Let's do that before we go select all my type. Okay. And I'm going to use command shift and full stop or period, depending what you call it. Now, if you're on a pc, it's control shift. Um and full stop or period. Okay, so it just kind of increases the consul, I want them up too three lines. Okay, so I'm getting it quite big. Um in terms of the leading, I'm gonna select it all. You can use the leading over here if you hover above. It should tell you it's line spacing, it's another word for it. I can decrease it. Okay, but a shortcut is if you hold down the option key on a Mac or the old key on a Pc and use up and down arrows. I find that it's just a nice quick way of doing it. Yeah, I'm happy with that. So you are 10 point you are at 10. I feel like there needs to be something different about the bottom here. I'm gonna get you there lining them up now, I'm just messing about. Um if you find that, say I want an extra line in here. Okay, I just want to fill with placeholder text because it did it automatically for me but say you you just need more with the box selected. Go to type and go to fill with placeholder text. Just kind of fills it up. It doesn't really matter if you cut it off. So I just want an extra line. There you go and put in a full stop there. So it looks like the end of a paragraph. Come on, hold up, awesome. Actually I changed my mind, I go back to you and I'm going to lower it down a little bit and I'm going to grab the line. Two, I'm going to draw the line either side just to kind of section this off actually I want to be seen length now. My had no stroke no no stroke, no fill so if I click off, it looks like it's gone basically it won't print because there's no stroke on it. I'm going to go white please. One point probably half a point. Just so you know when you are printing stuff like if this is going out digitally, it doesn't matter how thin it is. But if it's going out physically, I've printed stuff with lines that are really small. So the lowest you should go is this one here, .25. I kind of made one that was like . or something like that. And literally it rubbed off like you put your hand on the page and it was so thin that it couldn't hold onto the paper and it just kind of rubbed off on people's hands. So that was a big printing disaster. All right, so don't get too thin on lines. I'm just kind of using my keyboard now to tap this around. Oh man, does this look, what do you think people? Mm hmm Here's a full stop down here. Alright, so that is it for type and fonts. There's other things in here that I'm not going to cover. Like there's space between letters over here. The space between letters, there is left align, right align. I'll assume that you'll be able to work those out yourself. But yeah, let's get in and start doing some type on a path. We'll do that in the next video so hide it up. See you in the next video.