Adding Typekit desktop fonts to Illustrator

- OK, it's finally time to talk about one of my favorite type features. It's called Typekit. Typekit is a service that was originally intended for web typography. But when Adobe purchased it a few years back, and integrated it into the Creative Cloud, they began allowing users to sync Typekit fonts directly to their desktop. And so in this movie, I'm going to show you how to go out to the Typekit website and sync these fonts directly to your Creative Cloud account and then use them inside of your Illustrator documents. Let's go up here to the Creative Cloud desktop application, inside of the Creative desktop application.

Inside of this application, you can go over to Assets, and in Assets there's a tab for Fonts. By default, this might be turned off. If that's the case, there should be a button here that says Enable Typekit Fonts, or Sync Typekit Fonts. Go ahead and enable that now, or you can go into your preferences and turn it on. If you're ready to add fonts from Typekit, go ahead and click Add Fonts from Typekit. Once you click Add Fonts from Typekit, that's going to take you to this website. It should automatically log you in using your username and password for Creative Cloud.

if it doesn't, go ahead and sign in using the same username and password that you do for the Adobe Creative Cloud applications. Once you're here, you now have the ability to sync any of the Typekit desktop fonts directly to your computer and then use them in Illustrator. So let's go through this and let's find a new typeface for our magician poster that we've been working on. So let's go ahead and choose something like Decorative, and let's scroll through this list here. We want something that's good for Headings. And that's going to narrow it down to two basic ones, so Sail and Stencil Std.

Well, let's sync Sail to our computer. I'll click on Use Fonts, Sync selected fonts, then I'll click Launch Creative Cloud application. Once I get confirmation that it's been Synced, I'll go back over in Illustrator to give it a try. Once I'm inside of Illustrator, I'll select a piece of text that I want to apply this new font to. Go up to the Character Panel dropdown, and you'll see this little Tk at the top here. That allows me to filter based on Typekit fonts. So I can apply that and only the Typekit fonts I have currently synced will show up.

If I click on that, I can see what this looks like. Eh, not really feeling that. But remember, we have something applied to this, the All Caps setting. So let's go to the Character Panel here, and turn off All Caps, Let's see what that looks like. Still not exactly what I want. So if I want to get more fonts, I'll drop this down, choose Add Fonts from Typekit. That'll launch a whole other window, just like we had before, same basic setup. Once we get here, I'll just click on Decorative and let's find some of these Decorative fonts that I might want for my magician poster.

So I'll scroll through here, and. . . don't really like any of the Decorative fonts, so let's uncheck that box and let's find something maybe like BlackLetter, something like that. And let's sync this font Givry. Sync it. Launch the Desktop Application. Make sure that it's synced, looks good. Let's jump over into Illustrator. The font is already there. I can apply it and I really like the way that looks, but I'm gonna change it up a bit.

So, let's move this over, just for a second, so I can get a hold of it. Gonna double click inside of the text box and press Enter or Return, and we'll select this, let's use the keyboard shortcut we learned earlier, the opt + up arrow key to remove some of the leading. And I'm gonna select the top line, change the font size quite a bit just by using shift + cmd on a Mac, shift + ctrl on a PC, and the < Then, once I have that, got this Great Justini here, gonna grab Paragraphs, make sure it's center aligned, and bring it back down, and I'll scale it up.

There we go. If I wanna remove just a little bit more of the space, I can do that. Now, once I have that applied, let's work on this font, down here at the bottom. Let's go back to this dropdown here, go back to Add Fonts from Typekit, we'll add one more font here. Once we have Typekit open, let's look for a Serif font that's good for Paragraphs, and we want it to have this x height attribute, kind of a higher x height.

And the one that I like here is Expo Serif Pro. So, let's use that font. You can click Show All Fonts and it'll show you different styles that you can select from. In this case, I don't think I need the Bold Italic or the Bold, probably just the Regular and Italic, so I'll hit Sync and Launch the Creative Cloud Desktop app, make sure that that syncs over, let's jump back into Illustrator and let's apply this to our text down here. So let's go in, select Expo Serif, that looks good.

And we'll tuck this in. Just like that underneath. There we go. The only thing that I would probably do here is on this text I would add a live effect by going to Effect: Stylize: Drop Shadow Preview it, and I would increase the Opacity here to about 60%, that looks good. And so there is my finished poster, I would probably move this down just a little, get it away from that globe, but for the most part I'm done. and I made it look 10 times better in my opinion just by using those Typekit desktop fonts.

And the best part about this is, if I send this to someone else who has Creative Cloud, but they haven't synced these fonts yet, Illustrator will automatically prompt them when they launch this file to sync the fonts that are missing to their desktop, making it a seamless transition. You no longer have to worry about if you have the fonts, or if they have the fonts, or if you have the license or what have you, all of that is taken care of through the Creative Cloud, which makes it super easy to create great typographical layouts without any of the fuss.