Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Art and Writing

The fontist.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 1 comments link this post

I am a fontist.

I am frequently tortured by the use, over-use, and abuse of fonts. I no longer see signs or words or advertisements, but I see fonts. Overly stretched fonts, badly mis-matched fonts...

Some fonts I have grown to hate.

But fonts I have many of, on my computer. I'm not going to even tell you how many. This is so, when I get a design emailed to me or a customer shows me an image and says "can you match that font" I know I either have it, can get it, and hopefully have a vague idea on the identity of it.

For free software that helps you organize your fonts so that you don't have to go through thousands trying to find that perfect serif with just enough slant, I recommend The Font Thing. It's a good font browser and I've used it quite a bit. The initial setup, which involves categorizing all the fonts to how you want, takes some time. After that, it's handy. I set up categories according to how I find myself thinking about fonts when customers present them to me to match or when I have a job facing me and need a specific style. For example, I have categories for "athletic lettering" and "handwriting script."

I get my fonts free (though you need to watch and see which are for private use only, and which can be used commercially) at Themeworld and DaFont.

As it is, with all the fonts available at my fingertips, I've fallen most in love with the clean, boring kind: Trebuchet, Verdana, Courier. Things that look typewritten. Look at this web site. What do you see? Not a lot of serifs. Not a lot of "pizazz." After so many years with customers asking for "cool" fonts and always picking Gigi or Jester or Curlz or BlackAdder, I have grown to hate them and find myself leaning towards the simple fonts that no one ever picks when they don't have to think about any project ever again other than their own.