Type Tips Weekly

Take your love of letterforms to the next level. This series explores all things related to type and the practice of typography.

Introduction

• Welcome

March 2018

• Extreme drop caps
• Using the Illustrator Touch Type tool
• Working with pull quotes
• Designing on a diagonal grid
• Golden ratio

April 2018

• Cropped type: Working with large abstract letters
• Creating a word search
• Working with OpenType alternates
• Color fonts
• Working with picture fonts

May 2018

• Controlling text flow with span and split columns
• Designing with variable type
• Creating alternating color jazz type

June 2018

• Five steps to well-justified text
• Text wrap effects
• Creating a text highlight with padding
• Optical type sizing

July 2018

• Creating info boxes
• Using warp effects in Illustrator
• Working with transparency
• Tips for working with script typefaces

August 2018

• Measurement tips: Five reasons you should use points
• Using the Chartwell font
• Optically aligning a book cover title
• Five tips to better tables

September 2018

• Convey inclusion with connected type
• Create a listings page
• Creating a listicle with auto-numbered drop caps
• Creating an extruded shadow in Illustrator

October 2018

• An InDesign Baseline Grid Tip
• Creating offset outlines in Illustrator
• Photographing Type
• An Illustrator text warping tip

November 2018

• Five reasons to use the Story Editor
• Sans Forgetica
• Designing a minimalist calendar
• Representing opposites through negative space

December 2018

• Metrics vs. optical kerning
• Autogenerated captions
• Minimalist type with the Live Paint Bucket

January 2019

• Tips for typesetting poetry
• Align the first baseline only
• Optical vertical centering

February 2019

• Applying fractions with a grep style
• Using invisible paragraph rules on chapter opening pages
• Using Optical Margin Alignment

March 2019

• Spacing of items in a bulleted list
• Tracking tips
• Adding flush spaces
• Syncing type area with baseline grid increment

April 2019

• Creating mirrored folios
• Using a no-break character style
• Spacing type around a circle
• Monospace type
• Creating object styles for captions

May 2019

• Splitting and breaking stories
• Adding a shaded shadow
• Adding non-printing line numbers
• Fast formatting and text clean up

June 2019

• Knockout text
• Use conditional text to make teacher and student versions
• Highlight spaces in justified type

July 2019

• Fine-tuning spacing in a text block
• Multicolumn frames and threaded frames
• Creating an illustrated lyric using Live Paint
• The Glyphs panel

August 2019

• Combining type and images in an abstract poster
• "Nut" or stacked fractions
• The resolution of Photoshop type
• All you ever wanted to know about placeholder text

September 2019

• Creating movie poster credits
• Creating a vintage magazine cover
• Working with character styles at relative sizes
• Creating a travel book cover

October 2019

• Create a simple 3D type effect
• Putting type around a figure 8 or any overlapping path
• Shaping text with the Illustrator Touch Type tool
• Creating an ASCII text portrait

November 2019

• Creating hand-inked text in Photoshop and Illustrator
• Working with text frames in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop
• Creating abstract letterforms with the Illustrator Blend tool
• Blending letters with the Illustrator Blend tool

December 2019

• Handling prepositions in title treatments
• Typesetting a quote
• Looking for the word within
• Professional typography in Microsoft Word

January 2020

• Numbers in circles
• BLOKK
• Stroke

February 2020

• Spacing after a headline
• Typographic map
• Ornaments
• Word spacing

March 2020

• Catchwords
• Text wrap spacing
• Infographic

April 2020

• Leveraging the power of text frame object styles
• Create a Victorian type poster
• Set up an uneven column grid in InDesign
• Create and alphabet from a single grid

May 2020

• Adding a rule either side of a header
• Zero-width characters
• Text highlighting with a custom edge

June 2020

• Design a visual table of contents
• Converting outlines to an editable font
• Create an environmental alphabet
• Avoid problems when copying InDesign text
• Create a simple text knockout

July 2020

• Designing a product guide
• Experiments with type and pattern
• Experiments with live transformations and Illustrator area type

August 2020

• Getting the most from discretionary liigatures
• Fixing kerning pairs with a GREP style
• Stackable 3D or chromatic fonts
• Creating a simple index in InDesign

September 2020

• Adding flourishes to type in Illustrator
• Creating shaped text
• The InDesign Hidden Characters font
• Using a dotless i

October 2020

• Automatic kerning methods in Illustrator
• Desert island type
• Using type in Illustrator for the iPad
• Giving trees a typographic voice

November 2020

• Illustrator clipping masks
• Glyph shifting with OpenType
• Align to glyph guides

December 2020

• Auto-size text frames
• Go bigger
• Further explorations with variable type
• Using perspective distort in Illustrator

January 2021

• Using column rules in InDesign
• Vertical justification in Illustrator

February 2021

• Calendar
• Creating water-damaged type in Fresco
• Word counts in InDesign

March 2021

• Create a kaleidoscope effect in Illustrator
• Using libraries to copy text between InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop
• Working with ultra-compressed type
• In praise of ampersands

April 2021

• Dealing with difficult drop caps
• The tilde key trick
• A simple spatter effect

May 2021

• Font height options in Illustrator
• Stencil lettering
• Using the Repeat Grid options in Illustrator
• The problem with InDesign Text Wrap and anchored objects

June 2021

• Hand-drawn type (using a mouse)
• Text flow recap
• Approaches to typographic hierarchy
• Setting the fine print

July 2021

• Display drop cap
• Create a stained glass effect in Illustrator
• Bendy columns in InDesign
• Movie credit alignment

August 2021

• Extend a picture with type
• Art Deco type shading
• Type, transparency, and vintage illustration
• Create a vintage fruit crate type treatment
• Set the visual size of type

September 2021

• Vertical Type and the Touch Type tool
• Convert type to an art brush
• Type and picture frames using the Shape Builder tool