Have I mentioned that I LOVE fonts! They offer so many possibilities for creativity and can be huge time savers. In my first blog on fonts, I showed you where to find fonts, how to download them and how to use fonts without installing them. My second blog was all about Dingbat fonts, those fabulous fonts that are images instead of letters. Today, I want to encourage you to look at alphabet fonts a bit differently and find the amazing potential for designs hidden there.
If you are like me, you probably don’t often look at the bracket, tilde and asterisk keys of a font. And yet, there are so many possibilities to be found in those often overlooked characters. Type out a string of characters like the ones below and then look at them in different fonts. It helps if you duplicate the same set of characters several times. Then look through your fonts and you will start to see characters that are the seeds of potential design.
You can multiply tilde characters to make great borders. Brackets make awesome frames for photos or enlarge the design to make an entire page mat. The letters S and J can be combined to make swirl designs. The number 8 and the caret (^) can be the start of fun flowers. Be sure to convert your text to path and then start manipulating the character. Use the multiply function to create a string of tildes. The Duplicate and Rotate functions will help you create frames with brackets or parentheses. Also, don’t forget to use WYSIWYG to join those letters and characters together once you have them in place.
Once you see the hidden potential you will want to go on a treasure hunt to see how many designs you can come up with! See what I came up with in just a short amount of time. (As I look at this, I can see several more! Can you?)
Thank you for more of your wonderful information on how to get these intresting Fonts.
That was FONTastic. This place is awsome just can’t get enough of these wonderful hints & tips. Thank you. x
how do i get back to part 1 & 2?
Click on “Tricky Tuesdays” under the Craft Room topics on the left and then you can scroll through all of the past posts. There is a button at the bottom of the page that says Next Page or maybe Previous Page, I can’t remember which. Make sure to press that if you don’t find what you are looking for. There are several pages worth!
Absolutely wonderful idea. Thanks for refocusing my thinking!