Dtpfaq's Blog

Keep Your Fonts Organized

I must ask, how many of you  keep your fonts organized? How many of you install the fonts directly on the operating system? Especially when you are in a hurry. I know how it is but if you want to save time then you have to make a change.

When you work as a graphic designer, fonts are a great resource for your projects so after a while you might find your operating system full with hundreds of fonts. This is the easy way, install them directly in the Fonts folder of your system, but how great and fun is this when the system crashes and ups…you have to reinstall all.

If you make design projects for a living then never every install fonts directly on your operating system. Not only because your system will have some difficulties but we are dealing with hundreds of fonts, a font for the body text, another for titles, another for a special bullet and so on. You can use ten different fonts in only one project, imagine how things are after a while. Yap, totally out of control.

My advice is to use a Font Navigator. I use Bitstream and I’m very happy with it, but on the market there are many other font navigators, see which one is best for you.

First of all when you install fonts from a font navigator you don’t install them into your operating system, this avoids any unpleasant low program start-ups or other problems. Then you can organize your fonts in groups and name each group with the project name. Another helpful thing is the Font Viewer where you can change the sample text and browse through fonts and see exactly what font is better for your project.  For example if you already know what type of fonts you want to use, then you can save a lot of time by choosing to view fonts by format or style. You can print the font samples to see how it look on paper and you can even purchase a font directly, you have access to a huge library of fonts.

If you work your projects in programs where you can collect your fonts and make packages then I advice you to make packages at the end of the projects so you can have all in one place.

Here is an tutorial on how to use Bistream, I’m not paid to advertise for them, this is what I use and I’m very happy with it. If you are not very organized with your fonts hope you will start now, you will save a lot of time, is really worth it.