Using Typekit

I think one of the coolest things about having a Creative Cloud membership is the wide selection of fonts that you can download and use. For example, I'd like to apply a handwriting font to this text up here in the upper left corner of this spread, but I just don't have one that I like on my system. Well, let's see if we can find one in the Creative Cloud. I'm going to zoom in to 200% by pressing command + two, or control + two on Windows. Then I'll choose my type tool, click inside here, go to the Edit menu, and choose Select All. That just selects all the text inside that frame.

Now I'm going to head up to my control panel and I'll make sure that I'm in character formatting mode and I'll click on the Font menu. I've already looked through all the fonts down here and I can't find one that I like. So I'm going to click on the Add Fonts From TypeKit button right here at the top of the menu. Typekit is the name of Adobe's Creative Cloud font library. It was originally used just for web fonts. You know, fonts that you could use on websites. But now, we can use many of these fonts on the desktop, right here in InDesign. By the way, this button up here is repeated as a menu item in the Type menu.

There it is, Add Fonts From Typekit. The button and this menu item both do the same thing. They launch your web browser and they take you to the typekit website. Here is where you can choose a font. Now I should point out that Adobe keeps changing the type kit website from time to time. So it may look a little different when you try it, but it should work pretty much the same way. You want to first make sure that the Desktop Use button is turned on over here. That way you're sure to find fonts that you can use on your desktop, like in InDesign. You can also choose from all kinds of other filters and properties.

In this case, I know I want a handwriting font, so I'll click that here. That reduces my choices, and I like this Felt Tip Roman font. If I move my cursor over this font and click on it, it will tell me more about the font. You know, who made it, and so on. But in this case, I'm just going to click the Use Fonts link down here. I only want the Regular version of this font right now. So I'm going to turn-off the Bold checkbox, and then I'll click Sync selected fonts. That's it. Adobe tells me that it's now syncing the font. Now, depending on the speed of your Internet connection, this might take 30 seconds or sometimes a few minutes for it to download the font and get it installed.

I'll just close this window and return to InDesign while it's working. As soon as the font is installed, the Creative Cloud app notifies me, and then I'm ready to use it. And when I say, use it, I don't mean just use it in InDesign, I mean I can use it in any application: InDesign, Photoshop, Word, PowerPoint, whatever. These are just normal fonts. And once you install them, you don't even have to stay online to use them. Though you do have to have the Creative Cloud application running in the background. Here on the Mac I can see what fonts I have installed by clicking on the Creative Cloud menu.

Just look inside the font section, you can see that I have the Felt Tip Roman installed. On Windows you do the same thing but you click the Creative Cloud icon in the system tray. Okay now that I can see this font is installed, let's apply it in InDesign. I'll click back in InDesign and my text is still selected. So I'll just click in the Font field up here in the control panel and I'll type FEL and you can see there it is. There's Felt Tip Roman. I'll just click it there and now because I had both Italic and Bold styles combined in the text that I have selected here, I do need to turn on the Regular from the Style pop up menu as well.

That applied Felt Tip Regular to all of this text. I'll just click off here and can see that it worked. Oh, one more thing about typekit fonts in InDesign, if I'm not sure which of my fonts are typekit and which aren't, I can alway go back to my Font menu and I can click on this little typekit icon in the upper left hand corner. That applies a typekit filter. In other words, it shows only my typekit fonts. Then I can click it again to turn that filter off. Okay, now that I've used this font here, it acts just like a regular font. Now, the one exception is when it comes to sharing the font with other people.

You can't give these fonts to other people. Well, if you make a PDF file of the document, the font is embedded in the PDF. So that works fine. But if I send this document to a printer to print for me, InDesign will not include the fonts. Of course, if the printer has a Creative Cloud subscription, and I would hope that they do, they'll be able to open it just fine. And they can get all the same fonts that you have. But honestly, the best solution in this case is typically to send a PDF to the printer, not your live InDesign file. Oh, one last thing I should point out.

If you're done with this font, you know, you've decided you don't want to use it anymore, you can disable it by going to your Creative Cloud app. Again, in the menu on a Mac or the system tray on Windows. Then just click Manage Fonts. That takes you back to the Adobe website. And here you can click the remove button. I won't do that now, but later on in this chapter I'll show you what happens when you do. So, hundreds of legal and quality fonts at your fingertips, ready to use? You just gotta love typekit.