Hi, I'm looking for a bit of advice if you are ok with answering it, I absolutely love your tshirt designs and as someone who is trying to get into graphic design, my biggest problem isn't the art itself, it's the fonts. You use such perfect combinations of fonts along with your art, do you draw them by hand or download them from somewhere, do you experiment or do you know what you want right from the sketch phase? I get so lost with the amount of fonts the internet has to offer and how to combine them, I would love to know your process. Thank you!
Thank you for the kind words! I'll try to help if I can :)
I don't hand draw any of the fonts, I mainly rely on commercial-free ones, and my favorite place to source them right now is 1001 Fonts. I do minor edits to them sometimes to fit what I want or need, though (changing the thickness, shortening letter parts, adding curls, widening gaps, etc.)
I'm at the point where I generally know what I want it to look like at the sketch phase, but when I started out with these types of designs I would heavily research similar logos for inspiration and absorb what was frequently used or what the options for style were. I still do this often, actually, it really helps to learn the feel I want to go for.
When I'm in the final design phase I put the text in place and then cycle through the fonts I have, watching for anything that clicks. This part is mainly intuition and personal preference. I often end up with 5-10 different ones that could work and narrow it down further from there. Sometimes the fonts I have are close but not quite right, so I use 1001 Fonts and narrow the search filters to what I'm looking for (headline, vintage, script, handwritten, etc.)
In the end, my best advice would be to study typography. Research logos, study them, try to understand why they work, what types of fonts are used for certain things and how they affect the feeling of a design. If you have a theme in mind, try to look that up and see what's already been done, use it for inspiration.
