323 Typekit tips: Workarounds

- [Instructor] Hey there, I've got answers to three of the most commonly asked questions I've ever heard about using Typekit Typekit workarounds I'll call them. I'm going to assume that you know that Typekit comes will all Creative Cloud subscriptions, and you can download a pile of fonts, and you can see which fonts you're using in InDesign, just by clicking on the font menu, and any font with the little TK green symbol mean that you have synced it with Typekit. In other words, downloaded it. They're all showing green, because I've turned on the filter.

So if I turn that off you'll see them like this. But is there a limit to using Typekit fonts? Is there a number that you have to stop at when you, as far as downloading them? And yes there is. What is that number? It's kind of hard to tell, but sometimes if you are having trouble syncing fonts, and it might be because you're over the limit, and the programs are just not smart enough to let you know that. First, the fastest way to see how many Typekit fonts you have downloaded, is to go to your Creative Cloud app. On a Mac it's in the menu bar, on Windows it's down here.

And go to Assets, and choose Fonts, and here you'll see a list of all the fonts that you have downloaded. Now, it would be nice to see account, and that let you know how many you have available, doesn't. Instead, for that you have to choose Manage Fonts here, which brings you to the Typekit website. Assuming that you have logged in, which you must have if you've been downloading Typekit fonts, it'll bring you right to your account page, and uh-oh, you can see that I am over my limit here. I'm not sure how I ended up with 103, but it's kind of interesting.

But yes, you can see my limit is 100. Now, why is it 100? Because that is the limit of the portfolio Typekit plan. You don't see a link here for plans when you're logged in, but if you go to another browser where you're not logged in, and go to typekit.com, ah-hah, there's plans, and I click there, and you can see that the Portfolio plan allows you to have 100 fonts synced at once, out of the 5700+ fonts available.

So what I could do, is I could upgrade my plan to have 200 fonts synced at once. I don't have to go to another browser to do that, by the way. I'm going to go back here to get to that same plans page to Typekit. When you're logged in, you have to go to your account page. So I click Account. This is the Typekit account, not your Creative Cloud account. In here, here it is in angry red, you're over limit. Click Change Plans. And so for another $50 a year, not a month, $50 a year, I can have double the amount of fonts synced at once, which is kind of nice.

Now another common gripe that I hear is, "I can't archive the fonts, "I don't like the fact that they sort of live "in some phantom location on my hard drive. "What if I want to save the folder with the InDesign file, "and all the fonts used with it onto a folder on our server "where we keep archive projects? "And then maybe we need to do a reprint next year, "and I need to pull it out, "and we're not using Typekit anymore. "We're living as, you know, on Mars, "and they don't have Typekit there." Well, the answer is, then you just have to purchase the fonts. And yes, you can purchase these Typekit fonts as Perpetual fonts.

Some of it named Perpetual, but that's what they're calling software and fonts and things like that, that you actually purchase, instead of Subscribe To. The problem is finding those fonts, so again, we're going to go back to our Manage Fonts page on our Typekit account. And let's say that one of these fonts I want to actually purchase, because I want to archive it, and I want to use it as a regular font and not have to sync it with Typekit. Well, the problem is that you need to find out where the foundry is, because foundries lease their fonts to Adobe, but they also sell them on their own website, and you need to find that website.

The fastest way I've found to do that, is to go to your Manage Fonts page, find the font that you want to buy, here we say, Capitolium News 2, and then find the foundry. Now the foundry is right here, from TypeTogether, but before I jump there, I want to caution you that this has nothing to do with what they call a Typekit marketplace. Just to keep it confusing, Typekit Marketplace means that, yes, you can click Availability, and it shows you a price, but this doesn't give you the font that you can download, this just increases your limit of how many fonts you can have synced at once.

How about that? This means that I wouldn't have to include Capitolium in my 100 fonts, it would be extra. You'll find that buried in some explanation of what Marketplace means. So bypass Marketplace if you actually want to purchase the fonts, and get a Perpetual license. Go to their foundry from TypeTogether, and visit the TypeTogether website. Then, once I'm here at their website, of course there's, you know, 100s of foundries I believe, available on TypeKit, and so everyone will look different, this is for TypeTogether.

Find out where their fonts are. There's Capitolium. And then once I get here, then I can purchase them, as you can see, $204, or $33, whichever plan I want. That's the answer to that problem. The last question I hear a lot is, "I love using Typekit, "but I have to work with freelancers or clients, "who don't have Creative Cloud. "They have CS6, or CS5. "Now, I can export this to IDML, this entire layout, "which allows them to open it, "but there is no possible way "that they can get those fonts from Typekit." Well first of all, you know that you can always purchase the fonts if you wanted to.

But if you didn't want to get that drastic, people can subscribe to Typekit on their own. Let's go back to this page here with the plans. What you could do is just add another $50 to the invoice, and buy them a one year subscription to the same plan that you have. Then they open up CS6, it says that they're missing fonts, they jump over to typekit.com, they log in, and they download those fonts, or sync those fonts, when they go back. InDesign CS6, the fonts are available. It's not as integrated or smooth as it is with Creative Cloud, but they can still do it.

Or how about this, you don't have to buy them anything. Instead, ask them to sign up for the free Typekit program, and here they can choose from 280+ fonts, and have 20 fonts synced at once. Then you try to limit yourself to those free fonts, 'cause those free fonts are of course part of this big plan in Portfolio. Unfortunately, Typekit doesn't mention next to the name of the font, which plan they're included in. But, I was able to sweet talk the manager of Typekit into giving me a list of all of the 280 fonts that are included with the free Typekit account.

Yes, you know what's coming next. I'm going to give you a download where you can have the same thing. I've put them in a nice table in InDesign, and I'll make this PDF available to you. You should see a link going across the screen here, and also at indesignsecrets.com, in Resources, we have a list of files that we mention during our videos, scripts, and things like that, and I'll have a link here as well. You can see it's nine pages long, and alphabetical order by foundry, and there are 288 fonts at this point when I'm recording this, so 280+ is correct.

So, there you have it, the answers to the three most common questions I hear about Typekit, and I hope that you put them to good use.