the fact that setting a default font is not one of the most basic preferences is astonishing. How do you overlook this? And still so many years later, still not have it added?

May Myriad Pro burn in ****

Myriad Pro 12pt is a formidable foe for the New Document. Perchance one day it shall be vanquished.

This feature is long overdue. I hardly ever use Myriad Pro 12 pt in my illustrations, and yet Adobe gives no straightforward way to set my own default font and size.

Bumping this thread, as this is a much needed improvement to Illustrator that will decrease friction at the beginning stages of design and greatly enhance user experience.

Please make this more discoverable in the future. Finding it in a document in a tutorial here is hardly the way I would like to work.

I have used the "intended method" and it is a deterrent to the task. Yes, there needs to be a way to do this.

Can you please let users change the default text size. I couldn't find it, and adobe help couldn't either and directed me here. When working on 60"x60", I get tired of dropping in 12pt text and taking extra steps to find it, enlarge it, etc. Thanks.

You can change the default font by modifying a default character style in a document profile, in a way described here.
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/fonts-faq.html#change-default-font
After doing this once and setting all other settings, like swatches, graphic styles, symbols,, backup the file, because Ai will overwrite it the next update.

True, not the most fast way to change the defaults. Takes some time to set one up and restore. But do you change them that often?

Voted anyway :)

It would be nice to set things as your own default. Like the font, font size, stroke size.. instead of having to change it to the same thing over and over and over when you create a new file

This has been an unresolved hassle since Illustrator 3 at least, and I don't think Adobe takes it seriously.

It is a daily hassle: no I don't want to use Myriad Pro, and I spend 2-3 mins every time I first open a file in Illustrator fixing it, only to find I have to do it again 30 mins later.

Yes there's a fix, but it doesn't stick through updates. And it's unnecessarily convoluted. If you can ask me whether to "Select Same Tint %" in the general preferences, you can ask which font should be the default. Guess which one is more useful.

How can https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/fonts.html
be the best way to change the default font?
What would be so wrong with having it on the "Type" page of the "Preferences" menu?

I'm looking for a way to change a character in my default font. I use the font family Proxima Nova (an Adobe font, what I have activated). In InDesign you can choose between two character for the letter 'a'. There I can change the font with find glyph en replace it for the other one. This is an extra action I make for all my designs.

It would be awesome to set that letter 'a' as a default a in that typefont. Because I can only use the right one in InDesign. AdobeIllustrator don't has that option. Is there a way to change a character and set it as my default character in that font so that I can use it in all my Adobe programs?

I agree, it is an absurdly complicated process to get rid of the plague that is Myriad Pro! In fact, just trying to get your preferred document template, with the correct default settings, to appear on the awful home screen is an unnecessarily irritating process. I expect many, if not most, Illustrator users are professionals who need to quickly set their preferred corporate font for all new documents... but Adobe makes this just about as difficult as possible.

It would all be so much easier for all users if the change default font option was available in Preferences instead of having to do all these workarounds just to get rid of Myriad and change it to our preferred default font.

It's amazing to me that this ability has not been there from the beginning. Typographers don't have time to change Myriad to whatever font they need every time they open an Illustrator document. The option to choose a personal default font in preferences is a basic feature which a lot of people would appreciate.

There is a solution for this, I have done it in the past:

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/fonts.html#Changethedefaultfont

This would be extremely useful for those working with multi-language documents.

An intuitive way to integrate this could be adding some type of tag to a text box indicating which language/font to use by default. Also, if it is not too confusing after user a/b testing, being able to associate languages to a set of fonts for the box or an option to have only certain fonts show when typing in a certain language.

Why do we have to go through the complicated hassle of making custom document profiles to change the default font to something other than Myriad?

There should be a way to set default fonts for all language inputs. I use traditional chinese in a lot of my work but the default font uses japanese Kanji, which doesn't hold all the traditional chinese characters, making it difficult for me to change every time.