Fancy Font Pro Tip #1 Caps & Letter Spacing

Have you ever wondered how to make your fonts look really cool? Especially when you’re making a card or poster? One little trick you could do is make some simple changes and your words will look really nice. In our first pro tip series, we will teach you how to do 2 simple things to make your fonts look pro.

Before we get to the fun part, just want to make sure you know how to find the fonts. When you are in the canvas area, slide the bottom bar to the right and you will find it next to the stickers button. When you get into the interface, press the A with rainbow icon on the left of the text bar.

If you slide the fonts to the right, you will find 45 different English fonts, but do you know that you can create different effects with just one font? All you need to do is adjust the words from lowercase to all caps and/or adjust the spacing between the fonts. To demonstrate how the effect can be like, I’d like to show how 3 different types of fonts will look like when the spacing and upper/lower caps has been changed. The three different types of fonts is san serif, serif and script. 

What’s the difference between a san serif font and a serif font? San serif means that the font does not have any lines at the end of the character. See the difference below:

It can get confusing sometimes, but one really easy way to remember is to treat the word “san” as no: a font that has lines on ends: serif, a font that has no lines on ends, san serif. Easier to remember?

The first type of font we will demonstrate is a san serif font, Quicksand. You can find this and all the other fonts we demonstrate today in PicCollage.

Here is a list of the effect of how the font looks with different spacing and different caps state. Based on what effect you would like your card to have, you can choose the right combination. Below is an example of how a happy birthday card could look differently between all caps that has extra spacing vs regular spacing. What do you think? Which effect do you like better?

The next example is Museo, it is a serif font, do you see the lines at the end of the characters? That’s what makes it a serif font. The chart above shows how the the words “you’re amazing” look with the different changes in all caps/lower caps and spacing.

The example below shows the difference between the words “You’re Amazing” with different spacing. Which effect do you like best?

The last examples is a script font. From this example we can see that there are some fonts that won’t work well with all caps, Thirsty Rough is one of those examples. They also look a bit odd when they are given extra spacing, it could be because in the original design of the font you can see that each stroke should link to the next letter.

Here is the example below. Which font do you think looks better with the photo?

Now that you know this little trick, what you can do is look around in magazines and posters and notice how the professional designers play with their fonts: Do they use serif font or san serif font? are they using all caps? do they have extra spacing? How do they do it? and do you like what they are doing? If so, try using it with your own collages and designs in PicCollage! When you’re done, don’t forget to show us your work. If you’re on Instagram, tag us on #mypiccollage

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