Ever struggled with installing fonts on your computer and using them in Adobe Illustrator? This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to successfully install and utilize new fonts in your design projects.
Key Insights
- The installation process of fonts involves opening the unzipped folder containing the True Font Files (TTF) and installing them one by one, after which they become available for use in Adobe Illustrator.
- The installed fonts can be utilized within Adobe Illustrator by selecting the text and choosing the desired font from the font family dropdown menu.
- In case the installed font does not fit your design or the text gets cut off at the bottom, you can easily switch to a different font or adjust the size and bounding box of the text for better fit and readability.
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In this video, we'll be installing fonts. Let's begin by opening up our C drive and our unzipped folder.
From here, we'll see that we have a zipped folder called Fonts. To open it, let's double-click it, and we'll see we have an additional folder called Fonts. We'll double-click this, and here we have multiple files—TTF files, or true-font files—that contain the details for the font.
In order for our computer to recognize and be able to type in these fonts, we have to install them. So let's walk through the process of installing them. To do this, we'll simply double-click, and we'll see that an example of this font is shown, as well as the option to install it.
Let's install Chivo Black. We'll see a dialog box come up that says "Installing, " and when it's completed, we can then close it. Next, let's install Chivo Black Italic.
Again, we'll double-click on it and install it. Wait for it to install, and close out. We'll walk through this process, installing each of the fonts and closing them when they've finished, and when we've completed installing each of these fonts, we'll have them available to us within Adobe Illustrator.
I'll come back when I've finished installing each of these fonts, and then we'll begin using them. Once we've installed our last font, Nevis, we can now use them within Illustrator. To do this, we'll click back into our Illustrator window, and then let's select the text "Friday."
From here, we can go up to our Character panel and select the font family. Since we just installed Chivo and Nevis, let's start with Chivo. We'll start out typing "Ch i, " and we'll see that below we have different options for this font.
In this case, let's select Chivo Light Italic. In addition, if we need to change this because the Light Italic is a little bit too light, we'll go to the right to our Font Style, and we'll see we have each of the font styles that we've downloaded. Let's leave it at Bold for now, and we can see an example of how we're using the downloaded Chivo font family and style for our text.
Let's now switch this over from Chivo to Nevis. To do this, we'll go back to our font family, click, and begin typing Nevis. For Nevis, we only have one style of text, which is Nevis Bold, so we'll select it, and I like the look of this.
Additionally, let's make our 3 p.m. To 5 p.m. As well as May 20th both Nevis as well. To do this, we'll select the first one and then, holding Shift, we'll select May 20th as well. If we go to the top, to our Character panel within the Properties panel, we can click the drop-down menu, scroll down to Nevis Bold, and we'll see they'll both now change to Nevis Bold.
We'll move it up a little bit, and we've now formatted our top text. Next, let's edit the paragraphs below. We'll select the text, go to the top, and change it to Nevis by typing Nevis and clicking on it. In this case, this looks a little too bold for this text.
In addition, we'll see that it's cut off on the bottom, as indicated by the box with the plus sign in the middle. If we click outside the text, we'll see that this red box shows us that there's
Text missing here. This is to help us make sure that we're not leaving off text as we change up the style of it.
We'll click back on it and simply drag our bounding box a little bit lower so we regain the text we lost. Additionally, let's now change our text, as I don't feel like Nevis fits the vibe of our postcard. So with this text selected, let's go back to the top, click, and let's try Chivo.
With Chivo selected, we can go through different options for our text, and feel free to pick the option that you feel looks best. For me, I'll be selecting Chivo Light, and then we'll release. We're now getting closer to the formatting of our text; however, we are missing some of the text below.
We could select the text and expand the bounding box, or we can simply reduce the size of our text. To do this, we'll go either to the top control bar or over to our Character panel within the Properties panel, and we'll simply reduce the size so that it all fits. We can then click outside, and we're starting to have our postcard come together.
Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we'll be scaling our text and lining it up on the postcard. See you there!