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How do you organize or pick your font?

Texas_Signmaker

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
I have a massive, A MASSIVE list of fonts and it causes me anxiety going through the list to find a few fonts to use for whatever I'm designing. Question is, how to you guys pick or organize your fonts? I have my "go to" fonts but I sometimes get stuck using the sames ones and if I venture out and go though my giant list I find some new ones or ones that I liked before and forgot about. I'd like to do away with most of them and keep a list of 20-30 that I like... but then again I need that long list for when I need to match a font. What do you guys do???
 
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AKwrapguy

New Member
For me, the font is decided by the job. While I know it sounds a little tedious I have a basic idea of the look I'm going for, and I just open the font window or drop drop down and start browsing them. Since I already have an idea of what I'm looking for I can skim through them pretty fast. But I also only have about 3,000 fonts so it only takes 10-20 minutes.
 
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equippaint

Active Member
Dont be scared, pack them away in the recycle bin. 20-30 years ago when everyone started going to vinyl, you didnt have a billion fonts and it was fine. They were expensive and the old gerbers had a limited amount of space for them.
Theres no good reason to pack rat fonts, you wont use them and theyre easy enough to find if you ever need one.
 
bob

bob

It's better to have two hands than one glove.
equippaint said:
Dont be scared, pack them away in the recycle bin. 20-30 years ago when everyone started going to vinyl, you didnt have a billion fonts and it was fine. They were expensive and the old gerbers had a limited amount of space for them.
Theres no good reason to pack rat fonts, you wont use them and theyre easy enough to find if you ever need one.
Click to expand...

Words to live by. How many minute variations of serif and sans serif type faces do you need? Most of the faces that most people have are butt ugly to begin with. You only need a few. Some nice specimen faces and a couple or three serif and sans serif faces.
 
Texas_Signmaker

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
Well equippant, I did it. I just spent the last hour going though my fonts and removed most of them. I'm down to a good mix of about 50 and I feel like a weight has been lifted. I had some of the STUPIDEST fonts on there! I removed them from Flexi and not my system so we'll see how this works!
 
timgo

timgo

Graphics Designer
Texas_Signmaker said:
I have a massive, A MASSIVE list of fonts and it causes me anxiety going through the list to find a few fonts to use for whatever I'm designing. Question is, how to you guys pick or organize your fonts? I have my "go to" fonts but I sometimes get stuck using the sames ones and if I venture out and go though my giant list I find some new ones or ones that I liked before and forgot about. I'd like to do away with most of them and keep a list of 20-30 that I like... but then again I need that long list for when I need to match a font. What do you guys do???
Click to expand...
Search Googole "font viewer"" to find all you need:
font viewer - Google Search
 
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Sandman

New Member
Score one for Illustrator on Macintosh. Part of the OS is Font Book. You organize your fonts just like any other folder with sub folders. You can make categories, script, sarif, san sarif, display, I even have a category named Stupid Fonts which about 50% of the font ID requests I see in this forum would go into. So in Illustrator I just go to my font category and that family of fonts is all that displays. Then when the word you have is highlighted, the drop down menu of fonts changes the font to which ever one is highlighted in the list. I can hit the down arrow and the word changes to the font that is highlighted. I can go through a list very fast. I still have the entire font library ready to go. Illustrator does not do that on Windows. That said, I also need to streamline my font book. Like bob said, how many serif fonts do you need? I like Century, Bookman, Garamond, and Times. Most of the time the fonts have been pirated from the classic fonts, tweaked a letter here or there to claim it as a new font. I dare anyone to show me a layout with the main title in a sarif font where it looks sooooo much better with some off the wall font than one with one of the 4 standards I listed.
 
nickgreyink

nickgreyink

New Member
We used to use Suitcase Fusion on our Windows computers to sort fonts. Had the network edition so we could share fonts. Seems to work a bit like how Sandman described the Macintosh Font Book. You could categorize fonts by folder and either permanently or temporarily activate fonts. They even had Illy plugins to activate a font automatically if a Illy file got open with a font.

Don't have it anymore though. The price for the networking edition wasn't worth what we needed it for and the individual computer edition wasn't as handy between all of our computers and Illy started updating so fast the plugin couldn't keep up.
 
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ikarasu

Active Member
I now use Fontbase. It's still in development, but it's much, much better than suitcase fusion.

The paid version has auto activation - And prices arent bad. $3 a month, 29 a year, or $180 for lifetime. Currently they allow you to use it on unlimited computers... Though they said they might limit it to 2-3 in the future. But even if they do, it's a fraction of the price of suitcase fusion.

I keep every font added to fontbase, with a "Collection" of the most used fonts. That way when a custom sends a file with some weird, not often used font.. it'll auto turn it on in illustrator/photoshop, and I'm not spending 10 minutes trying to find the font the customer used, or e-mailing them for it everytime.

You can also type in some text, and it'll display what each font looks like in that text... So it's good for someone like me that doesn't memorize what every font looks like!

Best of all, it works for Mac, windows, and linux.

https://fontba.se/ Is the website - It's one of the best font managers I've used, and everyone in the office switched from suitcase over to it because it was less laggy/buggy, and the price is right.
 
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IsItFasst

New Member
I use NexusFont program to quickly view them. You can also add make collections to organize them into styles you may be looking for.
 
neato

neato

New Member
+1 for NexusFont. Best free font software I've tried. I'm guilty of hoarding fonts, but in the end I only use a handful for most work. I do have a ton saved on another drive for customer supplied art and font matching. NexusFont makes sorting it all easy.
 
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TimToad

Active Member
Suitcase Fusion and Font Book.

It's not so much the fonts we usually use that makes the pile grow, but all the ones that clients send with artwork and have to get activated just to convert their files to outlines or make changes to.
 
Texas_Signmaker

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
I like the replies. Thanks for the suggestions. I kept all the fonts on my PC and just hid them from my Flexi list so I can still use them but I won't have to go through them all when I'm picking a font. Ill give some of the other suggested programs on here a shot!
 
Breezy85

Breezy85

New Member
AKwrapguy said:
For me, the font is decided by the job. While I know it sounds a little tedious I have a basic idea of the look I'm going for, and I just open the font window or drop drop down and start browsing them. Since I already have an idea of what I'm looking for I can skim through them pretty fast. But I also only have about 3,000 fonts so it only takes 10-20 minutes.
Click to expand...

I second this. It depends on the job, what the customer wants or what I'm visioning for their design. I actually like browsing fonts, it's kind of therapeutic for me and I can go through them pretty fast when I have an idea of what I'm looking for.
 
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Andy D

Active Member
To find a similar font to a tired & over used font, for example, brush script...
I will use "Find My Font" and take a screenshot of brush script, it will then give
me 25-100 somewhat similar fonts to pick from.
 
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Andy D

Active Member
off topic... anyone else here remember the days when you were lucky to have 5-6 fonts for your Gerber plotter and
if you wanted to buy a cassette with one new font on it, it cost around $1000?
 
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