Creating Fillable Forms

Carl Shank • October 15, 2023

Creating Fillable Forms — Everyone uses a form, whether it is a doctor's form, or an insurance form, or a credit form or a school registration form. Form creating is both an art and science. You want a form to be readable, convey the required information and be understandable. We also want forms, if they are online, to be fillable, with fields that invite the applicant to simply click and type in the information requested. Three programs that I use to create forms are the Adobe InDesign layout program, Acrobat, and Google Forms. Each has their strengths and weaknesses.


InDesign Form Making — InDesign provides a path in the program for creating forms in their Button and Forms library. This is found in Windows > Interactive > Buttons and Forms which has form elements that you can use in designing your form. You can add simple form elements such as text fields, radio buttons, check boxes or signatures. You can also add actions to submit the form by email or print.


Solid strokes and fills to the form fields, on/off hover states for buttons, check boxes and radio buttons can be added.  You can specify font and font sizes in text input fields. You can then export this simple form to Adobe Acrobat for additional editing. See Adobe's Help Index on forms for more information.


What is not told is that you must actually create the form and then add the buttons and field boxes and so forth. Here a very helpful tool is to use InDesign Form Templates, which professional designers have provided for our use. These are beautifully constructed forms that can be opened in Adobe Illustrator and used in programs like InDesign. I have included four downloaded forms below to show you the capabilities of such designed elements.


The advantages of using a high end program like InDesign are many for form creation. Like any other professional layout program, InDesign has all the bells and whistles that you need to design a form of your liking. Its myriad font selections, color selections, design elements and so forth will help you create an attractive and eye-catching form that is unlike many of the standard line forms you have seen. Many people also use Adobe Illustrator for form creation as well. The Form templates offered by Brand Packs are visually compelling and created for everything from registration forms to medical forms. Note the examples below.


The disadvantages are also to be noted. InDesign and the Forms Templates are not cheap. The InDesign program itself comes usually as part of the package of Creative Cloud from Adobe and costs over $50 per month for a subscription, which is the only way the current InDesign program is available. You cannot buy a current stand-alone InDesign program. The last stand alone program was in the CS series, InDesign CS 6, which is not available from Adobe any more. Form Templates created for Adobe Creative Cloud are also available for a price, brand packs.com offer seventeen outstanding InDesign compatible forms. They are available in the Adobe Stock program for a monthly fee of $30 – $200 per month, which includes not merely forms but all of the Adobe assets. One time users can retrieve five professionally made forms for $50 up to 150 forms and other assets for whopping price of $1,200. This fee is in addition to the regular Creative Cloud program fee. Additionally, extra type styles which may not be available from Adobe or in the default program can be costly, since using these fonts come with licenses for which often you pay a fee.


Acrobat Forms —  One of the most used programs for creating forms is Adobe Acrobat. Editable PDF forms are available using Acrobat to securely secure data from customers and clients, vendors and more. Using Acrobat's "tool bar," fillable form fields, text fields, drop down menus, checkboxes and signature fields are available. You can either download a paper form from your scanner or from a file on your computer. Acrobat then adds fillable form fields which you can then distribute. (See Sample Below)


The steps are fairly easy —

  1. Open Acrobat:
    Click on the “Tools” tab and select “Prepare Form.”
  2. Select a file or scan a document:
    Acrobat will automatically analyze your document and add form fields.
  3. Add new form fields:
    Use the top toolbar and adjust the layout using tools in the right pane.
  4. Save your fillable PDF:
    You can also share it with others or click Distribute to collect responses automatically.

See https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/create-form.html for more help.


However, unlike InDesign's or Illustrator's many layout elements, Acrobat depends on forms that have been already created for those professional touches.


Google Forms — Certainly, one of the easiest and cheapest way to create and use a form is through Google Forms, available at forms.google.com or your Google Drive. Many users have Google Drive enabled on their computers. There are a few Form Templates offered. (See Illustration below).

  1. Step 1: Go to forms.google.com or Google Drive.
  2. Step 2: Select a template.
  3. Step 3: Change the title of your form.
  4. Step 4: Adjust questions and answers.
  5. Step 5: Customize the Google Form theme.
  6. Step 6: Preview your form.

Google notes that you can add a header image and customize the color scheme and fonts used. Google offers this advice — "When you're done, simply click the Send button, and choose to send it via email (either a link to the form or the entire form embedded in an email), copy a link to share manually, or embed the form as HTML on your site. When the responses start trickling in, you can see them in a list of aggregated data or individually, along with a collection of charts appropriate to the question type. If you're a spreadsheet wizard, you can take this data to Google Sheets and look for deeper connections there.


In addition to that Sheets integration, you can also pre-fill a form to save your respondents some time, collaborate with others on your form, and browse a collection of add-ons on the Google Workspace Marketplace. Bonus: if your respondents are Google users, their progress will be saved on any given form for a month, so they can click away and come back to it later." (https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6281888?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop#zippy=%2Ccreate-a-form-from-google-drive)


Takeaways. As an avid InDesign user and  typographer I tend toward using that platform for designing and using forms. Just to note that many of my colleagues use Adobe Illustrator, and that is all fine.  I like the creative freedom, the outstanding visual appeal possible and the end results seen and appreciated. I understand, however, the cost may be prohibitive for some, and busy office professionals may simply want a quick and easy form for their company. Google Forms cannot be beat with Adobe Acrobat coming in a close second. Take a look at the included forms below to get some ideas. If you would like CARE Typography to design your next form, let us know at cshanktype@gmail.com. We would be happy to quote you a price and offer a quick no-hassle turnaround.




Successful Layout & Design

Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble?

By Carl Shank • February 12, 2026
Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble? The latest Google estimate of available fonts is over 300,000 and counting. Other estimates have catalogued over 550,000 fonts. There are over 36,000 font families, over 4,000 type designers and over 2,700 professional font foundries, not counting smaller font entrepreneurs like CARE Typography, which provides restored fonts from yesteryear. (Quora source https://www.quora.com/How-many-fonts-are-there-in-existence-Does-any-group-attempt-to-keep-a-record-of-all-the-fonts-that-exist ) There are commercial fonts from sources like Adobe and MyFonts (Monotype) which require payment for their use in various platforms. Both provide a subscription service, which usually requires a substantial monthly or yearly fee to download and use their fonts. When I began using Apple Macintoshes in the 1980s, font manufacturers like Adobe and Monotype would “sell” the right to use a number of their fonts for thousands of dollars. And, by the way, you never really “own” the font. You have paid only for the use of the font for a specific purpose or machine. Moreover, the price varies for print use, or web use, or a digital ad use. Even today, the font Trinité Titling by Bram de Does, used in a number of Bibles and biblical studies, costs over $4,000 for the use on a single computer and much more for a number of computer users. Individual users of such fonts are mostly priced out of their budget. Why the seemingly extravagant cost? We had a valve on one of our household plumbing lines go bad. I called the plumber, and he replaced the valve — at a cost of several hundred dollars, while the valve itself cost only a few dollars. Was that fair? Yes, because I was paying for the time and training and effort going into replacing that valve in my house. The same holds true for professional font designers. They spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours in font development. We are paying for their livelihood. Font licenses cover four basic parameters around font usage — “The What: The weight and style of the typeface; The Where: Literally where you’ll use the font – a website, digital ad, or in print; The Who: The number times a font can be installed on a computer (aka the number of people who can use it); The How many: For example, web font licenses describe the number of allotted page views, and app and digital marketing licenses set similar parameters.” (Monotype Report) Companies like Monotype are rarely concerning with an individual using a font for a home, individualized project, but rather an entire design company or printer using that font for commercial gain and advertising dollars. There are fonts available “for personal use only,” prohibiting their use for commercial or money-making projects. There are what have been called “shareware” fonts, fonts with a minimal cost which require attribution of the type designer or provider on projects. Most fonts provide a EULA, or font license, which outlines and determines the legal restrictions and ramifications for their use. What about free fonts? Monotype warns against using unlicensed or what are called “free” fonts for several valid reasons, but, in my opinion, this is an obvious ploy to get the user to buy or subscribe to their font services. One Monotype report cites six issues associated with what are deemed “free” fonts. Free fonts may pop up in similar ads or designs to industry competition, perhaps prompting a lawsuit or cease-and-desist actions. Free fonts often have the inability to scale, add special characters, or even different alphabets. Free fonts have limited creative scope. They may be saddled with malware or software viruses. Poor font design can be a problem with such fonts. A sixth problem with so-called free fonts is that they can be actually “pirated” fonts, copied from legitimately designed fonts. “Aside from branding issues, free fonts also suffer from a whole host of performance issues. Fonts are software files that interact with applications and the operating system on which it’s installed; without the guidance of a skilled font engineer, rendering issues may arise from crashing glyphs, or a lack of proper kerning (the space between glyphs) text in certain scenarios. A free font downloaded from a random website might not support a broad range of languages and or complex scripts (e.g., Japanese or Arabic), or basic diatrics to cover commonly used Latin languages.” (Monotype Report) Monotype maintains that free fonts won’t give a company the individual style it deserves to help it stand out in the marketplace. They also point to the legal ramifications involved with font licensing, not a glamorous subject but one in which company attorneys are hired to examine for possible litigation. Types of Free Fonts There are four sources of free fonts — Open Source fonts with an SIL Open Font License (SEE https://openfontlicense.org ); OS fonts, fonts that come with your operating system and hardware; Subscription add-on fonts that come as an add-on to a subscription service; and, advertised free fonts by independent font designers, such as CARE Typography. Many or most of such free fonts come from freeware, shareware, public domain or demo fonts downloaded or reconstructed from an archive or library, like Internet Archive. Companies such as Website Planet offer free “commercial” fonts, fonts that can be used in business and corporate applications. See https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/best-free-fonts/. Several cautions, however, are still in order here. First, a font that “looks like” a standard, business font is not the same thing as its “older brother.” An example is Website Planet’s Playfair Display font, both a variable and static font designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen licensed under the SIL Open Font License agreement. Yet, this font looks a lot like the standard Bodoni font, created by Giambattista Bodoni in 1767 and revived by Morris Fuller Benton in 1911 under Linotype’s commercial license.

More On The Greek Font

By Carl Shank • December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 
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