Category: Tutorials

Running a business is challenging even in the best of times. You find yourself going way outside your comfort zone. You enter parts unknown and unexplored. You constantly face your fears.

And although entrepreneurship is rewarding, you may have to fail a few times before finally experiencing success. You may be tempted to give up at the most crucial time, just when you’re on the cusp of success.

Business motivational quotes can give you the motivation, encouragement, and spark you need to keep going when the going gets tough. They help you to feel not quite as alone in your struggles. And when you hear about real-life success stories, you can’t help but think, “If they can do it, I can do it, too!”

Check out these inspirational business quotes from respected and well-known individuals who’ve lived through the challenges of running a business—and survived.

1. Quotes on Entrepreneurship and Success

Just making the decision to go into business can plunge you into isolation. If your family and friends aren’t in business themselves, they may not understand what you’re going through. They may not be supportive of your business. And when they see you struggling, they may think they’re doing you a favor when they tell you to just give up and go get a day job.

Still some people may question your motives. They may have the preconceived notion that all entrepreneurs are greedy and only in it for the money. Even if you know this isn’t true for you, those negative attitudes can still sting.

These business success quotes may help:

“Ever since then I’ve gone into business, not to make money, but because I think I can do it better than it’s been done elsewhere. And, quite often, just out of personal frustration about the way it’s been done by other people.” Sir Richard Branson (Source: Reflections on Success)

“I did not start from here. I started on a small scale. When I was working for someone else, I spent my weekend buying and selling. I sold jewellery. I sold scarfs. My husband was also doing some buying and selling. Yet, he is a lawyer.” – Attributed to Folorunso Alakija (Source: WordsofWomen.com)

“I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.” Mark Zuckerberg (Source: Mark Zuckerberg Biography: What It Took To Invent Facebook and More?)

“There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire. If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain; do something to make more money yourself — spend less time drinking, or smoking and socializing, and more time working. Become one of those people who work hard, invest and build, and at the same time create employment and opportunities for others.” Gina Rinehart (Source: BusinessInsider.com)

“You don’t have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.” Attributed to Michael Dell (Source: Entrepreneur.com)

2. Quotes for When You’re Feeling Discouraged

Success at anything requires grit and persistence. It’s even more true in business, where the risks are high and disappointments can outnumber successes. And even when you’re doing your best, circumstances outside your control can throw a wrench in your plans.

These inspirational business quotes remind us that failure and hardships aren’t necessarily bad. They bring valuable lessons that help you succeed.

“You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.” Attributed to Warren Buffett (Source: CNBC)

“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” Attributed to Bill Gates (Source: InvestingAnswers.com)

“To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.” – Jeff Bezos (Source: Amazon letter to shareholders)

“For every failure, there’s an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.” – Attributed to Mary Kay Ash (Source: Entrepreneur.com)

3. Quotes for Women in Business

If you’re a woman in business, you face a unique set of challenges. You find yourself defying social norms and working harder to earn respect in an arena dominated by men. 

And then there’s the never-ending struggle to balance work and family life. Despite having careers and businesses, women are often still expected to be responsible for childcare and home management.

These passages from some of the most successful female entrepreneurs of our time may strengthen your resolve to carry on:

“I was once afraid of people saying ‘Who does she think she is?’ Now I have the courage to stand and say, ‘This is who I am.’” – Oprah Winfrey (Source: O)

“Being perfect is being flawed, accepting it and never letting it make you feel less than your best.” – Attributed to Jessica Alba (Source: Inc.com)

“If you take care of your mind, you take care of the world.’” – Arianna Huffington (Source: Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder)

“At the end of the day, don’t forget that you are a person, don’t forget you are a mother, don’t forget you are a wife, don’t forget you are a daughter. Because in the end, no matter how much money you make and how much success you create, What you are left is family, friends and faith.” Indra Nooyi (Source: Sun Tzu for Women: The Art of War for Winning in Business)

“The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it.” Attributed to Debbi Fields (Source: Inc.com)

“I don’t like to gamble, but if there’s one thing I’m willing to bet on, it’s myself.” Beyonce (Source: ABC News)

“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” – Sheryl Sandberg (Source: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead)

4. Quotes for Creative Inspiration

Great ideas fuel great businesses. But sometimes the creativity doesn’t flow as freely as we need it to. When this happens, it’s usually because fear and self-doubt are blocking the creative flow. 

These top small business quotes may get your ideas surging again:

“Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.” – Sara Blakely (Source: Forbes)

“To set high goals, to have almost unattainable aspirations, to imbue people with the belief that they can be achieved—these are as important as the balance sheet, perhaps more.” John Brooks (Source: Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street)

“If somebody is doing something that’s useful to the rest of society I think that’s a good thing. Like it doesn’t have to change the world. If you’re doing something that has high value to people, and frankly even if it’s a little game or some improvement in photo sharing or something, if it does a small amount of good for a large number of people that’s fine. Stuff doesn’t need to change the world just to be good.” Elon Musk (Source: Y Combinator)

“I don’t think that you’re born with gut [instinct], a gut matures and gets better and better over time, the struggle that most people have is learning to listen to it. Figuring out how to access it in some way. What I found is that even though I’m an engineer and an analytical person at heart the most important decisions I’ve made had nothing to do with any of that. They were always based on intuition.” Tim Cook (Source: Macworld.co.uk)

“Sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.” Larry Page (Source: University of Michigan Commencement Address)

5. Quotes for Challenging Times

As an entrepreneur, you’ll come across challenging times often. There’s always a new challenge, obstacle, or problem to overcome. They make the life of a business owner exciting! But they can also wear you down.

If you need a dose of extra strength to persevere, these motivational quotes for business owners may fit the bill:

“There will be ups, there will be downs, there will be sideways. I can just tell you I have been hired, I have been fired, I have been lauded, I have been vilified. I’ve said some of the most brilliant things that just by accident appeared on my tongue, and I’ve said some of the dumbest things that you could imagine. But each day – even the day that I knew I was going to be fired – I looked forward to because I’ve always believed that tomorrow was going to be the best day of my life.” Michael Bloomberg (Source: 2007 Tufts University Commencement Speech)

“The world is full of wonderful things you haven’t seen yet. Don’t ever give up on the chance of seeing them.” JK Rowling (Source: Twitter)

“You just got to stay focused and believe in yourself and trust your own ability and judgment.” Mark Cuban (Source: The New York Times)

“When the door closes you have two choices. Give up, or keep going. Let them shut you down or prove them wrong. We all start somewhere. It’s where you end up that counts.” Rihanna (Source: Grammy 2013 Trailer)

“I never thought I’d be successful. It seems in my own mind that in everything I’ve undertaken I’ve never quite made the mark. But I’ve always been able to put disappointments aside. Success isn’t about the end result; it’s about what you learn along the way.” – Vera Wang (Source: Seventeen)

Find More Inspirational Business Quotes

Need even more inspirational quotes for business leaders? Get your fill from these roundups of inspirational quotes for business owners covering a variety of situations:

• 
  Public Speaking
  15 Inspiring Public Speaking Quotes (Famous, Funny, & Fear-Reducing)
  Laura Spencer

• 
  Diversity
  15 Great Diversity and Inclusion Quotes for a Better Workplace
  Andrew Blackman

• 
  International Women’s Day
  Press for Progress: 40 Inspiring Quotes for Women Entrepreneurs
  Andrew Blackman

• 
  Presentations
  15+ Best Business Presentation Tips: Quotes From the Experts (For Great Results in 2019)
  Alexis (Lexi) Rodrigo

• 
  Black History Month
  Top 40 Inspirational Quotes of Black Entrepreneurs & Leaders
  Andrew Blackman

Have the Courage to Succeed

If you want a crash course in self-development, start a business. You’ll find yourself acquiring new skills and growing in more areas than you thought possible. 

Running a business isn’t easy and it’s not for everyone. In this article, you’ve seen some of the best business inspirational quotes we could find from business leaders in different industries. They may help you to stay motivated to give this endeavor your best shot. If you do, you’ll reap the rewards in terms of gaining competencies, experience, and possibly profits. 

Do you have a creative project that needs a monospace pixel font? Follow this easy step-by-step tutorial to learn how to create and customize your own monospace font!

What You Will Learn in This Monospace Font Tutorial

• How to set up your Illustrator file for monospace font creation
• How to define the grid and font metrics guidelines
• How to build a monospaced pixel font
• How to color the font glyphs
• How to adjust the spacing of a font
• How to catapult and export a font from Adobe Illustrator

Tutorial Assets

To complete this tutorial, you will need to purchase:

• Fontself Maker for Illustrator CC

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a basic, yet colorful monospace pixel font in OpenType-SVG.

What Is a Monospace Font?

Monospace fonts are fonts whose letters and characters have the same proportional horizontal space, meaning each letter has the same character width. Monospaced fonts originated from ‘typewriter fonts’. They basically mimic the slab serif font style used in typewriters, back in the day, because the letter spacing and widths used on typewriters were not adjustable, thus they had the same fixed-width space. Early CRT computer screens also used fixed-width characters for computer code, but in pixel form.

Today, monospaced fonts are used for displaying tabular data, like statistical tables and spreadsheets or in books, magazines, and so on, where large amounts of text need easy legibility. 

What Is OpenType-SVG?

Also referred to as ‘Color Fonts’, it is a font format in which the font has some or all its glyphs represented as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). This type of format allows multiple colors to display in a single glyph. 

Today, we will build a monospaced pixel font in OpenType-SVG format using Adobe Illustrator and its Fontself Maker plugin to bring the vectored letters into an OpenType-SVG font file with Fontself Maker.

Let’s start creating!

1. How to Set Up the Illustrator File for Font Creation

Step 1

The most important thing to do before creating our font is to set up the Adobe Illustrator file in the correct color mode. When designing OpenType-SVG color fonts, it’s best to set the file color mode to RGB.

Since we will create a monospaced font with a fixed width and in pixel form, we will work within a 50 px grid on a 7×7 block format. 

Create New Document (Command-N) and in the New Document dialog box, select either for Mobile, Web, Film & Video or Art and Illustration files, which come by default as an RGB profile.

Name the file ‘MonoPixel’, and set the dimensions and Settings to:

• Number of Artboards: 26 (For the A-Z letters of the English alphabet)
• Width: 350 px 
• Height: 350 px
• Units: Pixels

In the Advanced tab, More Settings dialog box, type in the following settings:

• Spacing: 50 px
• Columns: 26
• Color Mode: RGB
• Raster Effects: High (72 ppi)
• Preview Mode: Default

Step 2

Next, let’s lay out our grid. Go to Illustrator > Preferences > Guides & Grid and set the Gridline to Every: 50 px, and OK. 

Step 3

Turn on Rulers: View > Rulers > Show Rulers  (Command-R).

Turn on Snap to Grid to snap our shapes to the grid: View > Snap to Grid.

In order to align the grid to the artboard, click and drag that square to the very top-left corner of your artboard to set the grid to start in the top-left corner of your first artboard. You will see the ‘0’ value move.

Step 4

Open the Layers panel (Window > Stroke).

Our next step is to define our font metrics (Type Anatomy) by setting up guides that Fontself honors.  There are four main Ruler guides you should add, per row of characters. You will only need to set this once. Before we do, here’s a quick guide to the main font metrics you should know:

• X-Height: The height of a lowercase part of a letter. This is typically defined by the height of a lowercase x.
• Ascender: The part of a lowercase letter that rises above the x-height, for example, in letters like b and d.
• Baseline: Basically the line on which all letters sit. 
• Descender: The part of a letter that extends below the Baseline, like p, q, or y.
• CapHeight: The distance from the Baseline to the top of the uppercase letters.

Let’s position our Ruler Guides onto our canvas. To place horizontal guides, position the pointer on the top ruler and drag down onto the canvas to make a Ruler horizontal guide. Add four horizontal guides. Label each guideline in the Layers panel (double-click on the layer to rename):

• Ascender (ASCENDER or ascender)
• CapHeight (CAPHEIGHT or capheight)
• Baseline (BASELINE or baseline)
• Descender (DESCENDER or descender)

Step 5

Now we need to add two other artboard rows: one row for Numerals glyphs 0-9, and the other for the 15 Punctuation marks.

Go to File > Document Setup >  Edit Artboards. Select the first ten artboards, hold down the Shift and Alt keys, and drag down to duplicate the artboards.

Next, grab the 15 top artboards, hold down the Shift and Alt keys, and drag the set under the Numerals row.

Step 6

You will notice the Ruler Guides don’t duplicate when you duplicate artboards.

Select the four horizontal Ruler Guides, and then hold the Shift and Alt keys and drag them down to the Numerals row.

Repeat the process to duplicate the Ruler Guides to the Punctuation row.

Step 7

And for the last part of our setup, we need to organize our layers.

From the Layers panel, double-click and rename ‘Layer 1′ to ‘Guidelines‘. Lock the ‘Guidelines’ layer and tap the Create New Layer icon +. Create three layers in the following order: Alphabet, Numerals, and Punctuation.

Now, our Layers panel is organized, and we are ready to start building our font!

2. How to Construct a Monospaced Pixel Font Using Adobe Illustrator

Step 1

Let’s start building our monospace pixel font.

For the sake of this tutorial, we are going to create a Regular type font style, in uppercase letterforms, and in multicolor! 

Commonly, when designing a font, we use strokes to make the design process more adaptable, but since pixel fonts are square, we will work with square blocks instead.

In the 7×7 artboards, we will build our letters within a 5×5 block width. First, we will draw each letter square by square, and then we will give each square a color Fill, to create our color font.

Make sure you are on the ‘Alphabet‘ layer, and head over to the first artboard, so we can start drawing our first glyph, ‘A’.

Grab the Rectangle Tool (M), and apply a black Fill and null stroke. 

Because we have Snap to Grid on, we can easily draw our square blocks to make our ‘A’ shape. Create your ‘A’ style.

Step 2

Moving on, continue to use the Rectangle Tool (M), with a black Fill and null stroke, to create draw glyphs B to Z, on each individual artboard.

Keep in mind that all glyphs will be uppercase. This is a monospace sans serif font and should follow the five block width dimensions.

The character design itself is up to you. Make sure the letters are simple and easy to read when zoomed out.

Step 3

Next, we need to Group the shapes of each glyph—this will help Fontself Maker to turn each character into one glyph instead of two.

Grab the Selection Tool (V), and drag over to select the respective square shapes of each glyph, and then Group (Command-G). Group each of the 26 glyphs.

Then, in the Layers panel, we need to give each glyph group its shortcut key name. ‘A’ for A, ‘B’ for B, and so forth. 

In order to name the sublayers, Expand the ‘Alphabet‘ layer by clicking the > on the left. Double-click on the respective layer to rename. Then drag the layers in alphabetical order to save them in an easy-to-navigate hierarchy, from A-Z, as shown below.

Step 4

Moving on, let’s create our Numeral glyphs. 

Collapse the ‘Alphabet’ layer, Lock it, and move on to the ‘Numerals‘ layer.

Grab the Rectangle Tool (M) from the Tools menu, and apply a black Fill and null stroke. Draw in numeral glyphs 0-9, moving from artboard to artboard, the same as we did for the alphabet glyphs.

Tip: Make sure, when creating the zero, to cross it from the center in order to differentiate it from an ‘O’.

Step 5

Moving on, we need to group the shapes of each glyph, as we did with the alphabet glyphs.

Grab the Selection Tool (V) to select each glyph’s shapes, and Group (Command-G). 

After that, you can Expand the ‘Numerals’ layer, label each glyph, and layer in order.  

Step 6

Next, we are going to include the short glyphs, such as commas, dashes, and periods, in the monospace sans serif font collection. The most commonly used ones are:

@ ? & # ! , . – x + = ( ) / ’ 

When creating the punctuation glyphs, you will notice you cannot create glyphs in the same width as the alphabet and numerals. For example, the following marks , . ! ‘ cannot maintain the same width or height, so wherever it applies, you should align with the CapHeight or Baseline if possible.

From the Layers panel, Lock the ‘Numerals‘ layer and move on to the ‘Punctuation‘ layer.

Using the same creation method and process we used in Steps 1 and 5, create the punctuation glyphs.

Step 7

When you’re done, proceed by selecting each glyph’s shapes and Group (Command-G). 

After that, you can Expand the ‘Punctuation’ layer and name each glyph.

3. How to Color the Font Glyphs

Step 1

For the sake of this tutorial, I’ve decided to create a colorful monospaced font style, instead of regular black. 

Once we have designed our 51 glyphs of the Alphabet, Numerals, and Punctuation, we can move on to coloring the monospace pixel font.

Look for color palettes on Coolors or Adobe Color. Our brains are receptive to certain color formulas, so choose an appealing color palette and upload it to your Swatches panel (Window > Swatches).

For a fun approach, I decided to go with seven rainbow pastel colors:

• #ff6a4d 
• #fcd363 
• #65e0b3 
• #66b1ed 
• #925afb 
• #ff83b6 
• #d74983 

Step 2

Let’s start coloring! Unlock the ‘Alphabet‘ and ‘Numerals‘ layers.

We will color glyph by glyph. View > Hide Grid, for better visuals.

Select our color swatch group from the Swatches panel. Use the Selection Tool (V) to select the ‘A‘ glyph.

Select the Live Paint Bucket Tool (K) and our pastel color swatches from the Swatches panel, and apply a different color to the square blocks.

Step 3

From the Layers panel, click on the eye icon on the left of the ‘Guidelines‘ layer,  to toggle the visibility off.

Continue to use the same method of coloring to color in the 50 remaining glyphs. It might take you a little time to go through, so be patient.

4. How to Create the Font Using Fontself Maker

Step 1

Now that our font characters are colored and ready, we can move over to Fontself Maker. Fontself Maker is an extension for Illustrator, designed for making fonts.

Open the Fontself Maker extension. Window > Extensions> Fontself Maker. 

From the Layers panel, Toggle Visibility on for the ‘Guidelines‘ layer, and Unlock the layer. Then Unlock Guides, View > Unlock Guides. 

Delete the guidelines on both the ‘Numbers‘ and ‘Punctuation‘ guidelines, so we just have one set of guides to upload to Fontself Maker.

Step 2

We will upload each row of characters, one by one, to Fontself. Fontself makes things easy for you, once you have organized the glyphs and guidelines as we have.

Select the first row of alphabet characters, plus the Ruler Guides, and drag them into the A-Z space at the top of the Fontself window.

Then select the row of numeral characters in Illustrator, and drag them onto the 0-9 section of the Fontself window.

After that, select the punctuation characters in Illustrator, and drag them to the bottom of the Fontself window, the ‘Any character’ (Batch).

Step 3

You will see now that every glyph is placed in its own slot, and the marker beneath it shows the key associated with the glyph. Also, in the Fontself window, you will see a Live Preview of the letters showcased at the top of the panel. 

You can see your font in action in the Live Preview window, and you can even test type it for yourself.

Clicking on the Live Preview cog icon on the far right allows you to change the Font Size (25pt), Alignment (Left Alignment), and Background Color (Black).

Step 4

By default, Fontself Maker adds spacing between glyphs. You can play with the letter spacing by clicking the + and – symbols next to the Letter Space tab. In the Fontself panel:

• Letter Space helps you adjust the spacing between all glyphs.
• Line Space adjusts the Line Height.
• Scale adjusts the size of all the glyphs and the spacing and kerning values.

Click the Advanced button in the Fontself panel, and let’s change the spacing to a value of 70 by pressing + on the Letter Space tab. You will see the spacing change in the right column.

Note: If you want to adjust the spacing around a single letter, you can drag the sidebars left or right next to the glyph in the Fontself window. 

Step 5

Now let’s test out our font, to make sure we got the right spacing and keys for our glyphs. Go back to the Home panel, by clicking the Home tab on the top left of the Fontself panel.

Next, click the Install button in the Fontself Maker panel. This will install our font locally into Illustrator only, so we can test it some more and edit where needed. All the glyphs will be saved in an OpenType-SVG font, which means they will be visible only in Photoshop 2017+, InDesign 2019+, and Illustrator CC 2018+.

Give the font the Name: MonoPixel. Then go back to Illustrator.

Select the Type tool from the Tools panel, and our Font Family: MonoPixel from the Character tab in the top panel menu.

If you find an error and want to replace a glyph, then you need to delete the glyph from the Fontself panel, before adding and installing it again. This will place your new glyph at the bottom of the Fontself window. I personally prefer just to delete the set and reload them all again, so they are in order. 

Step 6

Get back to the Fontself Maker panel, and click on the Font Info tab to set the name of the font and add other details if you like. I called my ‘MonoPixel’ font style: ‘Awesome‘.

Step 7

Once you have tried and tested the MonoPixel font and are ready to export your font outside Illustrator, get back on the Fontself Maker, in the Home panel, and click the Catapult button. 

Fontself Catapult is a one-click easy solution to host your color fonts online.It will generate an OpenType file (OTF) that you can save, install, and use in OTF supporting software, web or mobile!

A window will open to give you the option to view your font on the web. Choose Firefox or Safari; they support OpenType-SVG color.

By default, your font will be private until you Publish it, and then you can have your monospace font download.

Congratulations, Enjoy Your Monospaced Font! 

Wow, wasn’t that easy?! Now you can customize your very own monospace font and make it available as a monospace font download! 

I hope you learned what a monospace font is, and the process of transforming font glyphs in Adobe Illustrator and then turning them into an OpenType-SVG color font in Fontself. If you don’t have time to create your own monospaced fonts, you can download our MonoPixel font from Envato Elements, or check out other great collection of monospaced fonts.

MonoPixel is a monospace sans serif font that comes in an Awesome font style. You can use it for display, headlines, or smaller subheadline text. Expand your font by adding some more glyphs or designing several versions of your typeface (like Bold, Italic, Black, or Light). 

I’d love to see your monospaced font designs. Please share your results in the comments below and on social networks. Don’t forget to tag #fontself!

Continue to expand your skills and learn other techniques. Here’s a list of recommended tutorials that can help you:

• 
  Adobe Illustrator
  How to Create a Color Font With Adobe Illustrator and Fontself Maker
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• 
  Fonts
  What Are Color Fonts?
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  Font Design
  How to Create a Font in Adobe Illustrator
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  Typography
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