First of all I must apologize for my long absence as I was finishing my 8th semester and was swamped with turning in projects and studying for finals.  Anyways, on to the (hopefully) good stuff.

There have been many times where I've been working on a design and have struggled to come up with a font that fits the project.  After I have sifted through my plethora of typefaces and still haven't come to a decision I look to one thing to alternative glyphs to give me the uniqueness I have been looking for.

There are many things OpenType fonts can do but I will cover what I think is the most important one, alternative glyphs.

Alternative glyphs are basically just another copy of a letter or symbol that is different than the standard one, but is still designed to fit the font as a whole.

For example, a font may contain multiple copies of a lowercase 's' including the standard glyph and one that is slightly more stylized and original.  By simply switching out the normal 's' for the more stylized version you still get the feel of the font itself but usually with a less generic look.

Illustrator makes this easy to achieve by clicking Window>Type>OpenType. 

This will bring up the OpenType box where you can choose the option of "Stylistic Alternatives".

This will switch all available glyphs with any alternative ones specified in the font.

You can also check out the fonts available ligatures as well as a few other options.  Just play around to see what each of them do.

One more tip, if you choose to use alternative glyphs but there are some you just don't like, you can manually insert or remove them by clicking Window>Type>Glyphs to see all the possible glyphs in the font.  Just double click a glyph to insert it into your text wherever your cursor is.

I hope you found this article helpful and something you may not have known about OpenType fonts in Illustrator.  Please send me any samples of work that this may have helped you with.