Swirl / Flourish / Floral Fonts

Swirl / Floral / Flourish Font Shapes for Indesign, Pages, PaintShop Pro, Microsoft Word

Flexible and fun shapes - stunning embellish floral designs

The embellish shapes sets / font sets include countless designs. The sets are for many different software. The embellish / flourish font sets are probably the most flexible of the design sets on graphicxtras as they may be used as a source for countless other content - so you can use the shapes as a source for a brush as well as a pattern and much more.

Combining the embellish / swirl / floral shapes tutorial

The embellish shapes can also be combined. You can combine them completely by using a pathfinder or add operation (or intersect or subtract option if you want to remove part of the shape from another shape) or you can simply combine them either on a single layer or over multiple layers which does offer the additional creative options of blending using different blending modes applied to the embellish shapes. The shapes are just a starting point for millions of different embellish / flourish / scroll shape designs.

Re-color the embellish / swirl / floral shapes

Most of the examples above show the swirl shapes only in black - they are not just black. They can be any color as well as a gradient or filled with color from an effect or perhaps filled with a texture or a pattern. It really depends on the software and some software are more flexible in the fill / stroke of the swirl shapes than others. If you are using an software such as Illustrator then you can manipulate the color of the font shape probably far more than a cheap application that has only basic functionality - it really depends on the application.

PC installation of the flourish fonts tutorial

The embellish / flourish TTF fonts are installed by either adding them using the windows font viewer application or simply by dragging them from any folder into the control panel 'fonts' folder (as below)

1) Select the true type font (this could be in any folder)

2) go to the control panel via the 'start' button

3) click on fonts in the control panel

4) drag the true type font / swirl / embellish TTF file from the folder to the control panel 'fonts' folder

You might be asked to enter your admin password as this point, depends on the security of your machine.

The font is installed in the control panel and can now be accessed via the font / typeface dropdown of any software

You can see the swirl font has been added to the control panel 'fonts' folder as above. You can now also delete the font, if you wish, and this will remove the font from the font / typeface dropdowns. Deleting the font might also require the admin password. Some fonts, those used by the system itself, cannot be deleted but third party fonts should be easy to delete.

Right clicking the selected font in the control panel displays a number of options such as 'delete', 'preview', 'print' etc.

PDF documentation included in swirl / floral font sets

Please note that the swirl / floral / font sets all come with a PDF document showing the relationship between the swirl characters and the keyboard. You can also use other software such as charmap (accessed via the start button) to see the layout of the font.

Indesign tutorial / typeface

The swirl / floral shape fonts can be used in software such as Adobe Indesign. To access the font shapes in Indesign, select the type tool and then select the swirl fonts via the typeface dropdown. To create text in Indesign, simply drag out the required text book and then type the characters A B C etc depending on the required design. Changing the size of the designs is slightly fiddly in Indesign.

Indesign / swirls outlines

Personally, I always find the text / type tool in Illustrator / Indesign etc fairly hard to work with once I have settled on the characters - so I use the

"type menu" followed by "create outlines"

Of course, once the swirl / floral characters are in outline - you can't change the characters to something else without deleting the shapes and re-typing the characters.

Indesign / Swirl / Floral outline and shadow effects tutorial

You can click the drop shadow button to add a drop shadow to the Indesign swirl shapes, you can also apply bevels, satin etc effects to the outline.

Go to the stroke palette (found in the window menu) and you can add a stroke to the outline path. The stroke palette also offers many additional ways to add variety to the swirl / floral font shapes such as adding dashes and arrow heads and arrow tails to the design as well as changing the color of the stroke. The drop shadow and other effects can be applied to the 'object' swirl or the fill and also to the swirl's stroke.

You can also modify the effects via the effects palette found via the window menu

Pathfinder / Indesign and swirl outlines tutorial

You can also combine the swirl / floral / embellish shapes with other shapes - such as a basic rectangles and also other outline shapes as well as duplicates of the existing swirl shape.

1) select swirl shape outline (previously font)

2) select another shape or more than 1

3) "window menu" and "object sub menu" and "layout command"

4) pathfinder

5) Apply one of the pathfinder options such as add, exclude etc

Use this to create 1000s of wonderful swirl and embellishment and floral shapes for Adobe Indesign

Swirl shapes / Indesign transformations tutorial

The shapes can also be modified by applying transformations such as scaling, rotation, shear and also free transforms. Select the outline shape and drag and then apply combinations of keyboard SHIFT etc to modify the existing swirl shape into a totally new and wonderful unique floral design. As well as the transformations, you can also use the 'direct selection' tool (found in the Indesign toolbox) to modify the individual points of the outline shape - again, creating a totally unique and wonderful floral shape. Sadly there is no warp / envelope option in Indesign.

Snippets and Mini Bridge and Indesign Floral shapes

If you have a favorite shape / favorite floral design and you want to save the swirl / floral shape for future use you can drag the outline to the Mini Bridge palette (if this is not shown go to the "window menu" and "mini bridge command"). The outline will be saved as a snippet in the folder you select - I often just add them to the collections folder but you can also just create your own folder setup for favorite shapes. The key thing here is the re-use. You can simply drag the floral / swirl shape back into Indesign and use as before.

EPS shapes / swirls

An alternative to using fonts in Indesign - use the EPS shapes also included in the font set.

Photoshop "file menu" and "place command" to load the swirl shapes. The swirl / floral shapes are then used as layers but they can be flattened into an image. Use the open command to load the swirl shapes into PSP. Other applications load eps shapes in different ways and you will need to check the manual for the import file type lists. The eps shapes can be set to any size (they are vectors)

Gradients and floral shapes in Indesign

You can also add a gradient to the outline swirl / floral shape. Access the gradient palette via "window menu" and "color sub menu" and "gradient command". The gradient can be linear or radial (sadly not too many options). You can add color stops and change the midpoint of the applied gradient.

Free swirl font sampler/demo

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Date modified: April 17th, 2012

Creating plugins and presets since 1995. Privacy - no details sent to third parties. After buying the swirl / floral font sets, you receive the download link to the designs - the file is a zip which needs to be expanded to access the supplied TTF and EPS vector shapes (the eps vector designs are included in a zip file as there are generally many of those). The zip file also contains documentation about the fonts and also a thumbnail gallery of the swirl / floral font shapes. The swirls are unique items - not duplicated in any of the other font sets. Commercial use swirls / floral fonts - use in countless projects such as posters, books, leaflets, parts of logos, adverts, packaging, surfboards, ceramics etc. All the designs are royalty-free.