Using Fancy Calligraphy Fonts

February 14, 2014

Calligraphy fonts are so popular right now aren’t they?  I love that there are so many options for fancy, swirly fonts out there.  I want to take a minute today to show you how to make sure that you have access to all of the fun swirls and twirls that come with your new font.

What You Will Need For This Tutorial:

– A sweet new font (generally these are always marked as an OTF – or Open Type Face font).  I am using Belluccia Pro for this tutorial.

– Adobe Illustrator

Here’s What You’ll Do

– Open a new document in Illustrator and use the text tool to write out your wording.

Go To Your Illustrator menu at the top of your screen and select TYPE and the scroll down and select GLYPHS.

This will open up your Glyphs panel.

You will then go back to your document and use your text cursor to highlight the letter that you would like to swap out.  I’ve chose the letter B here.

When you highlight the letter, that letter becomes highlighted in the Glyphs panel.

If you click on the letter in the glyphs panel, all the letter options for the letter you have chosen pop up.  Click the one you want and Illustrator will swap it out for you.  Here I have changed the letter B and the final letter e.

The other great thing about the Glyphs panel is that you can scroll through the glyphs panel to see every character that is available within a particular font and can sometimes find some hidden nuggets that are a bonus to that font.

Once you are satisfied with the way your document looks you can save it OR if you are more comfortable using Photoshop or have additional editing to do there, you can copy the text and then paste it directly into a document in Photoshop and continue editing from there.

Using fancy calligraphy fonts has never been more fun! Find great calligraphy fonts at Creative Market & MyFonts. Enjoy!