You can also add a Temporary section again here, so you know whether to keep or discard something. However deep or detailed you want to go depends on your personality and the size of your collection. For others, it is simply a way of sorting by general usage scenarios: For some, it means having a large, multi-layered system, with many branches. What does font organization mean? It can be different for everyone. Then you can store your frequently used fonts at those sites and access them if you’re away from a server or working from a different computer.
Check out sites like Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive for the most common services with free storage plans. There are many cloud storage services, and most offer a few gigs of storage for free. You can use it to manage your own miniature font server, which is accessible on any connected machine and always updated when you connect to the internet.
To make sure you always have your collection available, set up a folder in a cloud-based file hosting service. Use the Cloud to Access Your Favorite Fonts Anywhere It also automatically syncs those fonts with any Adobe app, but it’s subscription-based.ģ. This is an online, cloud-based management app with its own collection of fonts. These are apps you’ll have to purchase, but they offer some more robust and granular options for font organization and interface preferences.Īnother option is Typekit in Adobe CC. Other popular options include FontExplorer X and Suitcase Fusion. This will comb your files for duplicated fonts and either give you options or automatically resolve them, preventing any issues. Right-click on the fonts for more options, such as the indispensable “Resolve Duplicates” function. It offers the basic organizational tools you can expect from more expensive options. However, if you’re on a Mac, Font Book is free and comes with every machine. There are plenty of respected, easy-to-use font management apps.
Inform you of problems with a font and/or options for resolution.Control the organization of your fonts.No more duplicates or unused fonts you have to deal with later.Īll font management apps will cover the most important needs of a designer: Then you can search in that folder for individual matches. Move the remaining font folders or files to a Discard folder.
Once you’ve found the winning specimen(s), install or move them to Purchase and Install. You can set up a folder like the one below, or come up with your own system.
Move them from the Download folder to the Try Out folder - or an area where you can srtore them specifically for try-out periods. You or your employer could get in some hot water.Īre you the type who downloads fonts indiscriminately, in order to see the font in its actual environment? You would do well to create a Temporary Fonts folder as a sort of staging area for downloaded fonts. Just use the golden rule and don’t just trash that “README” file. I encourage you to read some pieces on the process, here, here, and here. Font designers are designers, just like you, and they do this work for a living. *Always honor licensing and usage rules for fonts, be they purchased or free. In addition, scrolling through hundreds of fonts you never use, in search of the perfect one for a job, is just a time-waster. Managing the active fonts also saves your apps a lot of time and work loading, previewing, and activating them. Chances are, it’s loading all the active fonts in your system. Why would we want to do all this work to keep fonts organized? Besides the inherent benefits of organization? If you’ve ever noticed that when you start Photoshop or Illustrator an app takes a while to start up, see which process it hangs on. It doesn’t have to be like this, and starting out in an organized way will save you hours and hours of clean-up later. If you’re new, let’s start off on the right foot. Then one day we realize something: in every project, we have to scroll through a thousand names in the font menu to either find one that works in our compositions or to find a name we know and swear is here somewhere. Be it from school, jobs, freelance work - they just have a way of landing on our computers in some buried folder we don’t have to worry about. We designers tend to accumulate fonts as we travel down our career paths. These 5 tips will help you organize your fonts to maintain your sanity, speed up your tasks, and stop scrolling past fonts you never use.