Fun with Fonts

As much as they told me during my graphic design degree that I should only ever need 2-3 fonts on my computer (one serif, one sans-serif, and one script), I've always loved my fonts. I generally have anywhere between 500-1000 fonts installed on my computer at any given time. True I rarely use them all, but I like having them around just in case.
When you have that many fonts though, without a way to see what they are, you don't end up using them anyway. I used to have a font manager installed, but lost it moving to Vista, it just wasn't compatible! So for about a year or so now, I've been struggling with my font collection. Not happy.

Anyway, I've found a great new font manager, MainType. It works with Vista, and does everything and more that my old font manager did. It's really neat, functional, and intuitive, which is something that so many programs get wrong these days (do those designers even USE their own programs? Seriously!).

Basically what a font manager does is pulls up a visual list of all your fonts, so you can see what they look like. You can also install and uninstall fonts, a few other things. What I like to use them for is when working on logotype designs. The programs normally have a screen with the full alphabet showing, or a quick brown fox line, to preview the font (MainType has a few options there). But what you can do is type in whatever text you like, and it will preview the font in your own text. So, just say I'm working on a new Fairies and Fantasy logotype, I type that in and breeze down through my fonts list to find a font that suits the text. It makes things so much easier.

Anyway, MainType is a neat, simple program that does the job. The only thing I wanted to be able to do that I couldn't was flick a uppercaps/lowercaps switch for the preview text.

MainType is from http://www.high-logic.com/
They also do http://www.yourfonts.com/ which is awesome fun! You can create your own font from your handwriting! It's pretty cool stuff... of course my handwriting is too disgusting to consider doing it...