Transcript:
Hey, everyone! Gary’s Simon. Here with a brand new tutorial. Today we’re gonna take a look at how to make a color font now just a few months ago. I covered font self, which is an extension that you can purchase for Illustrator in Photoshop right now. I’m at the the purchase page, but as you can see, a supports color fonts and even gradients and those which is really awesome, so I. Yes, it does cost money, however I do. Have a affiliate link where you can purchase it and get some money off in the description of the Youtube video. And you know, it’s not terribly expensive. If you really want to make fonts, so it’s like 49 bucks, it’s a little bit cheaper if you go through my link. By the way, this is not a sponsored video. I just really like the software in this topic, and they make one for Photoshop. I have the illustrator version as well here, so just a few months ago, though. If you’re more interested in about how to make an actual font and something, that’s a little bit More elaborate over the tutorial go to my Youtube channel here and just do a search for font, and you’ll see how to make a font font design process. That was three months ago and then also. I did this cool time-lapse video where I designed a font. And so I if you if you have it, you want to use it, I and install it. Just follow along here. Is the actual project. We’re going to do from scratch right here. That’s going to do two letters A AND C and you can see that it does have a gradient here, and then I’m going to show you how to actually get it into font self maker and then export it as an actual font that can be installed on your system and then. I’m going to demonstrate. This is in Photoshop that it is an actual font as you can see. I called it a color font, right there that you can use and edit awesome stuff as you can see. It’s also a type letter. Alright, so I. If you’re, you know, if you haven’t yet make sure you subscribe on Youtube channel and also for today’s question. Are you self-taught or are you going to school or a college for code? Slash design, alright? I’m just kind of interested what my audience makeup is. In terms of self-taught individual’s verse those who are or are planning to go to a college to learn code and design. Alright, let’s get started. Alright, so over here at font selfcom. I first! If you want to purchase this and fall along and you want to make your own color. Font, click on the theres. A sponsored link, It’s an affiliate link that I’m going to put in the description of the Youtube video. And that will give you. I think a few bucks off like five bucks off or something like that. But for pricing, you know, it’s like 49 bucks for either illustrator version or a Photoshop version. I have the illustrator version. I think you do get a discount and I get $5 If you want to support the channel, whatever he don’t have to anyhow, once you download it and then install it. I in the installation is very easy. I’m not going to cover that and you can access this window. After you get a new document up or not, you don’t even really have to have a document. Just go to window extensions and you’ll see fonts ELF maker 2.3.5 or whatever version. So the way we we begin. You don’t just start with a blank document. Go to this little hamburger menu and click font template. Alright, so this is the same process. I covered in the other tutorial as well, but except this time we’re going to make a a color font, so right here, make sure you go to layers, go to window layers and make sure this is up good. I’m my mug is not hiding that are covering this up. Fortunately, it basically all your artworks gonna go in this layer right here. All your individual paths now. I’m not going to make a full font. I’m just gonna do two simple letters, because obviously this isn’t about that. If you want that if you want more, you know, more of an in-depth tutorial. Definitely check out my other tutorials on this. So I at this point, you just going to make the font like you normally would whether it’s a color font or not so? I’m going to let’s see here. We’re just gonna use actually. I’ll use the pen tool. Alright, and I’m kind of I’m gonna use this. This guide that this this water marked a kind of just a very rough guide. So I’m just gonna left. Click once with the pen tool kind of eyeball it near the center and then come over here. All right, there we go we’re done, no? I’m just kidding so now with this general shape, I’m just gonna take I. I’m gonna click on stroke right here. We’re gonna change the caps to rounded and also the corners to rounded. Alright, so you have nice round corners and all that good stuff. Now It’s also a one-point stroke that is currently black. I’m not going to bother with the B. There’s too much stuff going on there. I want this to go a little bit quicker than that. We’re gonna do the C. So I’m just going to come here near the middle and just hold Alt and scale out to the top and bottom guide that hopefully you can see, yeah. That looks pretty. It looks pretty good right there, and I’m just going to make it a real quick C shape a cut out here by using the add Anchor Point tool, so just let click drag out. Choose that right there and then we’re gonna left. Click right here. I left click right here to add an anchor point and then come out here with the direct selection tool and delete that center point, and we have a very simple C. And I I’m good with this. I this isn’t the actual font. By the way it could be, but it’s not what I want to do. Now is take this and convert it to outline, so you can go to object path and outline stroke. I believe the shortcut is ctrl shift. Uh, no, for that, possibly actually let me see. No, it’s actually not. I forget what it was. I haven’t used that in a while. Alright, so now there, it’s it’s it’s a it’s an outline path. It’s an actual path and not a stroke that you can edit anymore. I wanted to kind of make it like an outline as we saw originally. So what we’ll do is lets. See here by the way when you do that. It creates a group. We don’t need that one in the middle, so I’m just opening these up and deleting that one. Okay, cool, so now. I’m going to give this a stroke. I’m gonna make it white, though. Both of them white first, so the fill will be white and this white fill will be transparent. We’ll get rid of it in a second, Let’s go ahead and give us a a one-point stroke and we’re gonna click stroke properties and align it. Yes, this stroke to the outside. They’re very simple, all right, so this group. I’m not gonna group it just yet just to make it a little bit more dynamic. For instance, we could make it a color font right now. Oh, by the way, let’s go ahead and outline that the way we did before. So we take both of them outline stroke. All right, so now they’re they’re full paths. If I click it, you know I can. I can turn it into a gradient. You know, if I take the fill here and just choose one of these gradient presets. Let’s get rid of that inner part. Real quick, there we go. It looks gray because of that eye background back there. Let’s go ahead and hide this stuff. And so this right here would be completely acceptable. You can actually take it further and make it look. As if the there’s a blend mode being applied. Now you can’t apply Blend modes here in Adobe Illustrator, However, they’re not supported with the color fonts. You kind of have to simulate the look so what we’ll do is? I’m going to zoom up here. I kind of want to make it look like these are overlapping on top of each other. So I’m gonna use the pen tool left. Click right around here. Come up to around there. Come all the way around. I want to make the opacity 0 just for now, and then I’m just going to come up right around here where I think it might intersect and then join these up and I’ll just take the direct selection tool and move things up, so that looks like, you know, this is consistent with that line beneath it. The angle. All right, so we take this. I just transparent, it doesn’t have to be transparent. It is though, and I will take this and select it and also hold shift and select that go to window. Pathfinder, it’s showing up on my other monitor, of course, and then we’ll go ahead and choose. Divide all right, so when we do that, we just have to select these areas that that we don’t need any longer. So now we have this thing going here. I when you do that, it creates like a copy, so just delete it. And now we can change the color of this. Alright, so I actually do not want to use this color overall, so just initially. I’m gonna take everything here. We’re gonna change the fill once again. Oh, I forgot to get rid of those two as well. Let me delete those from the inside, all right, so the the fill. I let’s come down to gradient options and that’s way too many color stops, so I’m just gonna left. Click and drag them off, and then I just want to use a different color, so kind of, like a purplish and this one will be more of a pinkish. Yeah, something like that. We’ll take the direct selection tool so we can just select just both of these holding shift. Get this real close, so you can see it, and this one is gonna be a flat color, right. There got in that dark purple preset right there. And then this one we could change this up a bit. I’m will have it go from this light color to something else. A different type of hue just to change it up a little bit. Yeah, like that. I think I like that now. That looks pretty slick in my opinion. Alright, so this one doesn’t have naturally any type of areas that intersect each other, so we’ll just make it. I don’t know this one, alright? And then we can hit the G key for the gradient and control the angle of that gradient. However, we wish all right so now we have our two, our two fonts or two characters. If you were really to go all out and do every character you’d be here for a long time, but we’ll just assume you’re ready to go. What you need to do is first. We’ll, rename this. It’s going to be our a and our capital C. Alright, and then make sure they’re grouped up necess, and you know, as necessary and then we’ll go back to our window extensions, font self and we’ll take both now. I wonder if this is going to give me that issue again because of my screen recorder. It wasn’t allowing me to do this, but I’m using something different, though. So we just simply just take both of these. We’ll drag them from the layers to this area right here. See, it’s not allowing me to drag it because I’m recording the screen. I’m gonna push it over to the other screen and then drop it real quickly. Yeah, it’s working now and there we go, so I now you can see you can start typing. It’s only going to have a and C. So if ABC or capital ABC. We see what we get, but that’s fine. We can see that the letters we created are working so now we can actually export this, so I’m gonna click on export and we can give it a name. This is the name that you know. People will be able to search through it through. You know whether it’s. Photoshop or whatever. We’ll just call this. I’m AC font AC color font there! We go hit. OK, save somewhere that you’re gonna remember open exported. Font, Alright, and it’s gonna show this, and I’m just going to install it like any other font. Alright, it’s installed. Alright, so now we can use it, so let’s go see, let’s try a Photoshop, for instance. Alright, so I just have a new document here. It’s 1920 by 1080 I’m gonna type in real quick. I want to change this. I was experimenting before I recorded this, so I’m just gonna choose. Arial, here. We’ll choose AC capital. Of course. Make this big for the big, exciting reveal. Um, we’re at a 8 there. We go right there and it works completely editable. Font that you can use in your designs and apparently. I haven’t tried it. It also works in Firefox and Chrome. I believe so, yeah, there we go now. Let’s say, for instance, like what if you wanted to try to change the color, would it work? No, well, not not in the standard way with the type tools. So for instance, we can see. The color is gray. So you can’t just change it to red, and it’s going to somehow figure out how to change the color. You can’t change it, however, if we’re talking about an app like Photoshop through different ways, so we can see we have our I. I’m a, but it’s almost covering it there. Now you can’t see it, but you can see it’s right next to my mug here, my head. If we double, click on the right side of the layer, we’ll get the layer styles and right up here. We could do a color overlay. I mean, this is just one of many ways to change color and you. If you go to normal, it’s going to just completely color overlay. Whatever so now you could change the color than that manner, but if you change the blend modes and experiment with that, what I’d like to do is to select it, select it twice, it’s outlined to blue. We can use the down arrow key on the keyboard to go through them to see if there’s a cool. I don’t know some type of overlay that matches whatever we’re trying to do. So this one will make it all red, but we could still see, you know, the different shades for vivid light, so we could change the color here and just start experimenting and depending on how obviously, with the vivid light blend mode, depending on how much saturation we give it, it will really change the appearance greatly. Alright, cool stuff. I’m gonna hit cancel. Though there are other things you can do, you can do a gradient overlay on top of a gradient. Hopefully it doesn’t create a hole in the fabric of space-time and all that, but if we change the blend mode. I mean, you just that. The possibilities are endless, obviously in terms of customizing the color. All right, so that my friends is essentially it when it comes to creating color fonts. Alright, guys. Hopefully you found that useful. Make sure you subscribe here and also leave a comment, especially answering today’s question. Which is are you self-taught, or are you going to school or planning to go to a school of some sort to learn either code or design? Well, let me know, alright. See you guys soon.