Type styles, glyphs and variable fonts in Paint by Zaweba

Once you make more than one graphic for the same purpose, consistency starts to matter. A run of social posts, a menu with several pages or a set of product labels all look better when headings, prices and captions match exactly. Paint by Zaweba has three panels that help with that and with the finer points of type: Type Styles, Glyphs, and the axis sliders for variable fonts.

Type Styles

The Type Styles panel stores formatting under a name. Select some text you have set up the way you like it, choose new from text, and the font, size, spacing and other character settings become a style. Apply that style to other text and it takes on the same look in one click.

When you change your mind, edit one example, then redefine the style from it. That updates the definition so the look can be reused. If a piece of text has drifted from its style because you tweaked it locally, clear overrides brings it back to the stored version.

A simple set of styles goes a long way. Most projects need only a heading, a subheading, body text, a caption and perhaps a price or call-to-action style. Name them plainly so you can find them later.

The Glyphs panel

Fonts hold far more characters than a keyboard can reach: accented letters, arrows, currency signs, fractions, dingbats and alternate letter forms. The Glyphs panel shows them. You can browse any font by Unicode block, which groups characters sensibly, for example Latin extended letters or mathematical operators. A recent row keeps the characters you used last, and an alternates view shows the different versions of a letter the font offers.

Double-click a glyph to insert it at the text cursor. It is the easiest way to get a proper multiplication sign in a size like 30 x 40, a degree sign in a temperature, a pound sign on a keyboard set up for another country, or a decorative ornament between two lines of a wedding invitation.

Variable fonts

A variable font holds a whole range of styles in one file. Instead of choosing from Regular, Medium and Bold, you can set any point along an axis. Paint shows a slider for each axis the font has. The common ones are weight, width, slant and optical size, and some fonts add custom axes of their own, such as the roundness of corners or the length of serifs.

Weight is the one you will use most. Sliding a heading to a weight between Semibold and Bold can make it sit just right against a photo. Optical size adjusts letter shapes for the size they will be seen at, with more open spacing and sturdier strokes for small captions and finer detail for big headlines. Width is a clean way to fit a long word into a narrow banner without squashing it.

Putting them together

A neat workflow is to choose a variable font, set the exact weight and width you want, then save that as a Type Style. Every heading in the project can then share those precise settings. Use the Glyphs panel for the special characters, and the whole set stays consistent from the first graphic to the last.

Mistakes to avoid with styles and glyphs

Too many styles defeats the point; if two styles differ only by a point size, you probably need only one. Remember to redefine a style after changing your example, or later text will still use the old look. With variable fonts, extreme axis values can look strained, so preview at the size the text will actually be used.

These panels sit with the Character and Paragraph panel in Paint by Zaweba, and together they give you most of the type control you would expect from a dedicated layout program.