This system of alternate characters allows compatible applications to be able to make your pieces look a bit more organic, and yet to keep the ease of use and flexibility of a typeface.

The creators of all these type families have painstakingly created alternative versions for their characters (along with some other cool goodies, like swashes, shadows, etc.), so the type blocks you’ll be writing don’t feature the same letter “A” all the time. The imperfections that should be part of a hand-lettered piece won’t be there, and the resulting piece will clearly be identifiable as a typeface, rather than a manually crafted type element.īut these aren’t “regular” typefaces. This means that you’ll only have access to one rendition of the letter “A” for instance (the most frequently used letter in the English language). Why? A lot of typefaces include only one set of characters. They feature characteristics (hand-drawn style and/or aging artifacts) that, in regular typefaces, would very obnoxiously show everyone that this type piece or block has been written using a typeface. Let’s have a look again at the beautiful typefaces that are included in the Monster Creative Font Bundle (Includes Web Fonts).Īll these typefaces have something in common. While it makes sense from a design standpoint (ever heard of the “no more than three fonts” rule?), it doesn’t really do justice to the other amazing options that you have at your fingertips. Hey Design Cutters! One of the things I realized from my poster tutorial is that it’s using only two typefaces out of the ten families offered in the deal. You’ll learn exactly how to unlock the hundreds of extra characters and symbols available to you with these, or any extensive opentype fonts. This tutorial is a bonus tutorial, that leads on from Simon’s in depth poster design tutorial.

However, once you master them, you really open up so many more possibilities when working with great fonts.Īfter getting so many questions about how to use the extra characters, glyphs and swashes available with the fonts in our current Monster Creative Font Bundle, Simon has been kind enough to put together this comprehensive guide.

Swatches, contextual alternates, glyphs, ligatures… if you’re not familiar with how to use these font features, they can be a little intimidating to start with.

Fancy fonts with glyphs