There’s a nice tutorial over at Suffix.Abuse about using glyphs. Many fonts have alternate versions of letters that you can use for a more decorative look, and you can access them in Illustrator and InDesign through the glyphs menu.

For those of you on a Mac, the Keyboard Viewer is another helpful way to get the most out of your fonts.

Bring up your System Preferences (found in the Applications folder), and click on “International”.

Next, check the box for the Keyboard Viewer (under the Input Menu tab). You may want the Character Palette as well. Scroll down a bit and choose your language/country too.

You can close your System Preferences now. You should see a new icon in the top right of your screen, in the Finder’s Input Menu (don’t worry… I didn’t know it had a name either). Click and hold on the icon and select “Show Keyboard Viewer”.

A little keyboard will show up on your screen, and it responds to any key you press. Then you can choose a specific font off the Font Menu.

Now you can look for that fancy ‘d’, the ‘y’ with the big flourish, or just find the copyright symbol (hint: it’s option + g).