Extensis, the makers of ye old Suitcase, have a new thing called Connect Fonts.If you want more though, what’s left in the font management software arena? Font Book has the basics like Collections, previews, and activation/deactivation.įree and good enough tends to win in the software game. The original came out way back in 2003 (Panther), so there has been time for users to get used to it. I would think these would be a staple bit of software on all designers computers (at least Macs, I don’t know other OSs very well), except for one thing: macOS comes with software called Font Book.app. Probably more stuff I can’t even think of.Keep actual font files organized on the OS.Offer a variety of different previews to help you explore/choose (custom text, lorem ipsum, character palletes, different sizes, etc).Organize fonts into groups (either manually, via tags, or both). Say you need a spicy italic? Where are my THICk BOIs? Which are my symbol fonts? Font management software allows you to group and organize things however you want. Figma: you gotta know what you need going in.ĭesign software, at least any that I know of, doesn’t do much to help you choose. Adobe Illustrator font menu, including previews which I imagine are extra computationally hefty.īut in software that co-mingles what they offer plus my own local fonts (Figma), plus without a preview, it’s a mess in there. I find my own fonts a little much to navigation through sometimes, in design software that only shows my own local fonts. Don’t quote me on this, but I just haven’t seen the “my computer has become unusually slow because of all my fonts” thing in a while.īut #1 is still a thing. It was a known problem and I imagine design software (generally) or even OS’s themselves have found workarounds to this. I have a feeling #2 has become less of an issue over time. Too many active fonts could slow down or even crash some design software.That can lead to self-made poor UX in finding the font you need. It makes the font selection menus in design apps super big.In any case, you don’t want that many fonts actually active on your system. Our systems would have been a font disaster if not for the predominat font management software at the time: Suitcase. We were forever activating and deactivating the fonts used in those projects. I worked in Digital Prepress for ages, the job of preparing digital documents for real printing presses, and dozens of jobs from different designers crossed our desks every day. Thousands! But there are other jobs that have this problem. The big problem they solve? Too many fonts. I think its worth a little reflection on why FontExplorer X, and the general category of “Font Management Software” exists. That’s a year away still, but I wouldn’t expect any updates or improvements during that time, me. Your software will continue to work as usual, but please be aware it will no longer be updated or supported after June 30th, 2023 It doesn’t mean users (like me!) need to stop using it this instant or anything.
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