How To Create The Signature Pokemon Font

If you're a stickler for graphic design and also happen to be a Pokemon Go trainer, you've probably been wondering what's the most captivating way to set up the fliers for your upcoming Pokemon Go bar crawl. Now, looking for the official Pokemon font is a great place to start, and locating it would be a bigger win than snagging a legendary bird. But without direction you could be searching far and wide... throughout the Internet. So just where can the official Pokemon font be found?

The closest mock-up of the Pokemon font is available for free download at Dafont.com. You can receive two versions: one that exists as a thin, hollowed outline of the traditional lettering, and one that's solid and filled in. Neither are perfect duplicates of the original Pokemon font, sure, but if you want to be meticulous about those fliers, there are little ways you can manipulate this font so it's as close to the title as possible. All you need is Photoshop, some patience, and the understanding that it's impossible to duplicate everything from your childhood... but you might as well try.

First of all, let's look at the original Pokemon logo. It's iconically made up of a yellow base with a thick blue trim. The outline of the hollow font definitely lacks some of that thickness and all of the definition inside the lettering that makes it jump. We're going to try to duplicate that the best we can.

So the first thing we need to do is pull up Photoshop and type in the word we're Poke-ifying. The Pokemon title seems to have a mix of capital and lower case letters, with vowels typically lower and consonants typically upper. Then select "strong" as your font level, and turn it blue.

Here I'm using my name as an example, just so you get the idea. Next, you want to go to layers, to layer style, to blending options, and check off "Drop Shadow" (you can also play with the opacity of the shadow so it's not super dark against the white background). "Inner Shadow," for the record, usually just turns your outline black. You then want to flatten your layer, and start coloring in the words.

To get that bold yellow and blue coloring, you could definitely eyeball the title, and try to gauge what shades would work. Or, if you want to get next level about it, you can cut and paste an image of the title and siphon the colors using the dropper tool. In short, make the core inside color yellow-gold and the inner shading deep gold. Also, make sure to go in with the paintbrush tool to make it look like certain letters overlap without intersecting lines; in other words, get rid of the overlapping blue lines and choose one letter to be up front. And after all that effort it looks absolutely...

Well, good. Yes, it's not an exact copy, but in a pinch, these techniques will help you amp up your Pokefont game. No go forth, download freely, drink responsibly, and catch 'em all like no tomorrow!

Images: 4Kids Entertainment (1); Giphy; Mary Grace Garis/Bustle (3)