![]() Find your design styleīefore you start drawing, you need to define style properties for your glyphs such as stroke sizes, grid proportions and so on.īegin by doing some readability test at different sizes and build a template you will use to draw all your glyphs. ![]() To build your own icon font, the first step is to design icons – we will use Illustrator for this task – and then save them as SVGs. Each allows you to build a font by either ‘cherry-picking’ pre-built icons from public libraries, or by uploading and compiling SVG files you’ve prepared yourself. Traditionally font creation had been known as a difficult and demanding task, but thankfully building icon font sets, has become considerably easier thanks to easy online tools such as IcoMoon, Fontastic, or Fontello. We’ll cover the use of SVG in another article. There are two widely-used methods to add a set of icons to your projects: In these cases you’ll want to draw a new icon set from scratch. Or you may just want to better coordinate the design of your icons with the other design elements of your project. On some occasions, however, you may need more specific glyphs not included in a generic set. You can find many free or commercial icon sets on the web, and they are often included in major CSS frameworks ( Bootstrap 3 Glyphicons is a perfect example). On the first line of text, you can see how I changed the “h” and “o” to have longer letter strokes on the front and back end of “how to.” Now, look at the word “glyphs” on the left.An icon system can often become central design element in your web project. On the left, you will see the out of box letters that appear when typing, “how to use font glyphs” and on the right, my edited version of the graphic using the Freestyle font glyph options. Here’s an example of the before and after of altering this graphic with font glyphs: BUT if you know how to access pretty open type font glyphs in Adobe Illustrator, you can save yourself for sacrificing the font you really want to use and clean things up a bit! Most people just jump ship right then and there and try to find another font. Second, when using specific fonts, especially handwritten or calligraphy style fonts, you may quickly find that the letters look CRAY together. There are two main reasons you need to know how to use Font Glyphs.įirst of all, if you are designing a graphic with fonts and want a unique look, accessing the font glyphs will allow you to completely alter the style of your typography! On the right, is a font glyph or alternate version of an “f” to get a completely different look! They are often called contextual alternates and stylistic alternates as well.įor example: In the image below, the “f” on the right is the standard out of box character style for one of my favorite fonts, Freestyle. You just have to know how to find them! So for today’s episode of Bar Cart Brading, I am going to show you just how to access pretty open type font glyphs in Adobe Illustrator!Ī “glyph” in the font world is another term for a character alternate. Have you ever snagged a fancy font online that had the prettiest swashes and strokes in the advertisement images, only to realize when you went to use the font you didn’t have all those extra little details to use? Technically, you do.
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