How to: Make a Hand-Drawn Font

Before I start, let me say that this is by no means the only way to make a hand drawn font. Ever since I began giving away fonts, I’ve had many requests for me to write a tutorial on my font making process, so here it is. This is how I do it, and depending on your responses, I can go deeper into a FontLab Studio tutorial. This tutorial, however, is designed to reveal my process from start to finish. A lot of you may not have FontLab Studio, so you may need to adapt the second half of the tutorial to whatever font software you may have access to. Here we go.

How to: Make a Hand-Drawn Font

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Photoshop: How To Make An Awesome Grungy Paper Texture From Scratch

Many of you might remember my Free High-Res Grungy Paper Textures I gave away a while back. I had a lot of requests for a tutorial on how I actually made those textures, so I here we are. Fire up good ‘ol Photoshop, have a scanner handy, and let’s dive in, shall we :)

Photoshop: How To Make An Awesome Grungy Paper Texture From Scratch
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Video Training: Learn From the Pros at Adobe TV

If you’re like me, you always want to learn more. Many of you have probably heard of Lynda.com, a great site with thousands of video tutorials on a variety of subjects, but you have to pay for the good stuff. Adobe has recently launched a very slick video site called Adobe TV where you can learn from the pros by watching videos and following along. It’s not quite as structured and comprehensive as Lynda, but it’s free. If you’re between projects, or just need some time to waste, you might just find a diamond in the rough somewhere in the videos.

Video Training: Learn From the Pros at Adobe TV
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Working with Illustrator ‘Art’ Brushes: Options and Adjustments

In this tutorial, I’m going to cover several things that effect the way we use Illustrator brushes. Remember, there are 4 types of Illustrator brushes, and this tutorial will be covering “Art” brushes. There are many things that effect the way your brush stroke will take form, and I hope by the end of this tutorial, you have a better idea of what you can tweak to get the results you’re looking for when using your art brushes.

Working with Illustrator 'Art' Brushes: Options and Adjustments
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Illustrator: Rid Yourself of Pesky “Expand Appearance” Woes

In the spirit of April Fools day, I wrote a tutorial on something I once considered “tricky.” If you’ve ever run into problems while trying to “Expand Appearance” on your brushes in Illustrator, you’re not alone. Expanding the appearance of your brush work has many helpful uses because you can get paths that outline your shapes, instead of just the brush stroke itself. This helps preserve the shape of your brush work when scaling and allows you to send files to print with outlined paths that prevents problems when the printers open your files, among other things. Let’s get started.

Illustrator: Rid Yourself of Pesky
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