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Typography in Practice

Now let's go into illustrator. And basically what I'm gonna be talking about is developing a type palette, as I call it. But now let's take a look at how I basically go about doing that. The first thing that I do when I'm determining the right type faces to use is I try to figure out what the overall theme of the piece is gonna be. And I decide on what I call the key typeface, the key typefaces, the basis for every other typeface that I choose. So, for instance, when we were working on that little thing for Rome earlier, I knew in my head immediately before I got started that I wanted to use Trojan Pro for that because Trojan Pro is one of the, um, fonts and typefaces that really makes me think of like an old Roman Empire poster or sign or something like that. And so that's the types of things that you'll learn over time. But for the most part, let's say that somebody comes to me and they say, We want you to do a brochure for a construction company, so I have to think about it for a se...

cond. I'm like OK, so I'll set up my key first. So let's just type out construct and then go into the character here, and I already have something in mind. So I'm just gonna go in and find the example that I want, and when I find it, I'll choose it. So this is D. D. C. Hardware. This is actually a type face that comes from Aaron Drop Lin, if you don't know who are in drafting is I highly suggest, given that a quick throw into your Google machine and, uh, and taking a look at some of the stuff that he's done very famous logo designer does some really great stuff. And so this word construct, it's very mechanical. This typeface is very sort of industrial, hard edged type face, and I think it works really well for this type of project. But now I have to think about other typefaces that might go along with this, and I need to have contrast, remember? And so what I'd like to do when I'm pairing typefaces as I like to go to the basically the antithesis of whatever the key typefaces. So in this case, it's a Sand Saref block typeface. So maybe for the body copy of whatever this is, I would choose something like a thin serif typeface. So maybe I would choose something like, Let's go through here and find maybe something like Georgia and just do the regular typeface and change the size a bit. Something like this. So let's see what this looks like construct working hard every year. So that's very heavy contrast between those two, and I think that actually works pretty well. So if we had the construct as headlines for the brochure and then the times or the Excuse me, the Georgia typeface as the body copy for the brochure, that's gonna look really good. Especially we style it the right way. Now I'm also going to need 1/3 typeface because my palettes consist of three basic things. They consist of a key headline, a body remain and then we have what I call an accent typeface, and so generally I'll go back to the key typeface and then I'll put a little spin on it. So in this case, I want a san serif typeface for this, so I'll just choose something really simple. Like Avenir is a good one. Let's go back. Chose Avenue next. I just want Avenir and then decrease the size of this as well. The reason I decrease the signs of this is because I want to sort of mimic the relationship of what they would look like on the actual piece. So in this case will say next page because maybe that's something that I put at the bottom and then move that down a little bit. In that way, we kind of get an idea of what this is gonna look like all together, all right? And so this is basically what I do. When I set up a typeface palette, I create the three basic typefaces that I'm going to use. This doesn't necessarily translate toe everything that you do for logos and just single blocks of text. Chances are you're not gonna have three different typefaces that you have to select, but when you're working on a broader project that has multiple pages, multiple types of texts going into it, this is the process that I go through. Then I go and I try to see what this would look like in different settings. So I'll put it on light backgrounds, black backgrounds, I'll change. The color will change the size. I'll mess with the tracking or the current ing in between individual characters and just try to make it fit as best I can, Keeping in mind that I need to maintain the contrast between all three of these and I need to use them in the proper context throughout the entire piece. So I don't want to ever switch the body copy for the headline font or anything like that. I want to keep everything as it is here. And so this is something that I will actually submit to the client as well. I would type out an actual heading from whatever it is I'm working on. I would also type out a paragraph of the body and then I would have an accent. Maybe that's like a block quote or something like that. And I would display that on a page, and I would say, Okay, this is what I'm thinking about for the layout of the inside of the brochure. What do you think about this? And then I would get their feedback. Sometimes they're gonna have meaningful feedback. Like I I find that a little hard to read. Or maybe we need to change that color. And that's all good feedback. Chances are they're not going to say, Oh, well, we need a thinner sans serif typeface for that. They're not gonna give you that type of direction. You're gonna have to sort of extrapolating what they mean when they say, I can't really read that. I don't really like that. You're gonna have to determine exactly what that means in translating to what typefaces you select. So that's something that's also very important Teoh to consider. Now, let's wrap this up by talking about where to find good typefaces because you can't create pallets if you don't have typefaces to actually do it. So some of the ones that I find very useful Number one is something that's already integrated into the Adobe Creative cloud platform. And that is something called type kit. Type Kid is a service that allows you to search for and sink fonts directly to your desktop. You can go in and search any font you want, or you could just browse the ones that they have. So if I go to browse here, it's gonna show me all of the different type faces they have. The great thing about this is the fact that these typefaces will sink to your desktop computer to any computer you have. And as long as you're signed into creative Cloud, all your typefaces will be there, there, sink locally to your computer. They're not just sink through the cloud and don't exist anywhere. They're actually sink to your computer, and you can use them in any application. So my type kit fonts don't just work in illustrator. They work in word or keynote or wherever it is that I might be, which is super helpful. So let's say, for instance, that I find a typeface that I like here. Maybe like this Ah, gastro monde typeface. Here, I'll go ahead and select that I get a preview of it here. I can type out what I want to say if I want to, or I could just say, You know what, I like it. Sink it and it's gonna go out, and it's going to sink that to my creative cloud account, which is then going to sink it to my computer. Now you'll notice here. It actually tells me I've exceeded my limit. That's how big of a type nerd that I am. I've sent way too many typefaces to my computer. I can go in and I can manage my sink fonts and get rid of some of these. But as you can see, I'm over typefaces too many. So it would take me a while to go through there. But if you want to remove them, all you have to do is hit a NSYNC and it a NSYNC them automatically for you. Now what if you're not invested into the adobe creative cloud ecosystem? That's fine to some of my favorite fought places to go are here, and I'll show you all of these. So first and foremost, if you want really great typefaces, you're gonna have to pay for him. And one of the best places to pay for him is my fonts dot com and all of the typefaces you could ever want are pretty much hear everything that you would find, Um, in any of the big type repositories, that kind of thing, they're all gonna be here. Adobe used to have something big called the Adobe Font Folio. Most of those typefaces can be found here and purchased individually the lost type collective. This is a great website that has a lot of different type faces. You see, there's the DDC hardware typeface I was just using earlier. They have lots of them, and what's great about this is if you go to one of these and you want to get it, all you have to do is hit like get, and then it comes here. If you're doing for personal use, you can pay what you want. So if you're just using this for your own personal use, you can pay whatever you want. 5 2040 year, $100 doesn't matter. You can also do a 1 to 5 user commercial license, and so that's just gonna be 55 bucks. 55 bucks might sound initially like a lot of money for a font. It's not. It's not a lot of forms cost upwards of two or $300. So this this website is actually very, very fairly priced de font. It's D a fon t dot com is a great place for free typefaces. I would warn you here, though. You get what you pay for when you download free typefaces, because sometimes they're not well designed. Sometimes they don't include all the glitz and punctuation marks that you need. So my recommendation, when you're downloading from here, is to actually click on it and then scroll down. And it will show you all of the characters, glitz, symbols and punctuation marks that are included in there. Make sure you do that research first so that you don't get surprised when it automatically substitutes a period or an exclamation point to another fun. And then, finally, the last one that I use all the time is font squirrel dot com. It's a very similar service to default dot com, but I think that there are a lot. I think the selections a little better here, and I think the quality is a little better here as well. Now, one of the things you might want to use going forward is something called a font management system. If that's something you get too many typefaces like I do, you need to be able to turn those typefaces on and off so that your computer doesn't get overwhelmed. The best thing to use for that is an application and the application that a lot of people uses something called suitcase from extensive, and you could go to extensive dot com and you can see the suitcase product. And basically, this is a way to manage, turn on, turn off sync different fonts to your computer. You can also cloud sync the fonts. There's tons of features to this, and it is a pretty reasonable price for all that you get. And it's something that I use on my production machine all the time. So that's gonna wrap up our look at typography. If you have any questions again, you can hit me up any time. If you saw my email address, you've got it. If not, you can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Justin Seeley and always available to help you win and if I can, So thanks again for watching again. My name's Justine Hope See again real soon