How to Create Colour Changing Sticker Fonts for Goodnotes Elements a Step-by-Step Guide

1. Create Your Sticker Designs

To create colour changing stickers, we need some designs. In this tutorial, we'll use basic black circles with weather icons created using the ellipse tool, the pen tool. You can draw your icons and stickers from scratch or you can convert PNGs to vectors using the image trace function - please keep in mind that there is a limit to the number of anchor points in your final design for using with Fontself. So clean up your designs to have only the necessary anchor points

2. Convert the Icons to Shapes

Next, if you have used the pen tool with stroke weights to create your designs like I have, then we will need to convert the paths into shapes. To do this, select your design and click on "Object" in Adobe Illustrator's Menu bar , then select "Expand". Alternatively, you can use the shortcut a keyboard short cut if you have set on up. Since we need to repeat this step for all the icons, I highly suggest that you do make a keyboard short cut.

3. Merge Shapes Together

Now that the icons have become shapes, we need to merge them together. To do this, use the path finder tool making sure that in the end we have only one colour, black. For these icons that I have made in the video I used the minus from front option in the pathfinder window.

4. Align Your Sticker Font Designs

Once the shapes are merged, we need to ensure that they're all on the same alignment. It is up to you if you want to align by centre, top or bottom. The alignment really depends on your designs so use your best judgement here.

5. Create Your Sticker Fonts

Next, we'll use Fontself Maker to create the font file. Open up the Fontself Maker extension from Windows > Extensions > Font Self Maker and select the appropriate option based on the number of icons you have. In this case, we have 10 icons, so we'll use the "0 to 9" option. The icons will be automatically added to the font file as the numbers zero through nine. Once you have all the digital sticker fonts that you want in this collection go ahead and save the font and name your font that describes your collection of digital sticker fonts.

6. Install Your Sticker Fonts

Finally, install the font on all the devices you use Goodnotes with - this will ensure that you see the your digital stickers instead of numerical values of a default text.

Custom Magic Colour Changing Stickers for Goodnotes Elements

And there you have it you have now peeked behind the curtain and seen how the magic stickers are made. Creating colour changing stickers for Goodnotes can seem daunting at first, but it's quite easy once you get the hang of it. It is a bit of a nuance that Goodnotes doesn’t allow us to import vectors any other way but this is the best workaround that we have for the time being. I hope that they change it as it would help users experience since the file sizes are much smaller the app will load much faster.