How do you find fonts for a project?

I'm starting a new brief for an existing client, a logo for a London-based cycling service (will post up in due course for crit).

My usual method of working is to find a nice typeface first, always seems to work for me, but I spend ages going through my font library to earmark a few before brainstorming.

So, at the moment I'm going through my library one by one and it's quite laborious...
 
I don't have a lot of need for a massive amount of fonts so I can normally just go through the font viewer in win 7.

You could always look at getting software which enables you to label your fonts with tags, a bit like you would images and then you can search for these tags rather than going for the whole list of fonts.

Here's a load of options for if you're on mac or windows :)
25 Font Management Tools Reviewed - Smashing Magazine
 
I spent a day categorising all my fonts in Font Explorer by there visual attributes; Rounded, Freehand, grungy, Slab Serif etc and got rid of a load of rubbish free ones. Was a major yawn, but has saved me so much time in the long run and means I don't keep gravitating back to the same 5-10 typefaces.
 
RussellHall said:
I spent a day categorising all my fonts in Font Explorer by there visual attributes; Rounded, Freehand, grungy, Slab Serif etc and got rid of a load of rubbish free ones. Was a major yawn, but has saved me so much time in the long run and means I don't keep gravitating back to the same 5-10 typefaces.

I spent a few hours starting this a little while back, then had a corrupt something somewhere and had to reimport all the fonts... and lost all my work. Then I found the Local Backup option!

All I can find to do it in FE is to add a keyword (like serif, sans etc) to the fonts' comments field, then make a smart folder - how did you do it?
 
I just set up new 'Sets' for the different categories and drag them over from the main font library. When I'm working on an identity I tend to set up a new Set for the project too so I can create a long list of possible base typefaces before playing about with them in Illustrator.
 
Ok, so looks like I'm not missing anything then. FE could do with a keyword palette like iPhoto or Bridge to quickly assign keywords to groups of fonts.

I'll save the reorganisation for a quiet rainy day!
 
Back
Top