OT: Choosing a font

[Vince42]

When I started with logo design, I printed all the fonts that I had, marked the ones that would meet the design purpose and tested them in several design variants. Meanwhile I have 1,700 fonts on my Windows, Google offers another 2.3k and I cannot and would not print them all. Most font managers are not design-oriented but rather listings by names etc.

Currently I am, for example, trying to find a nice font for visualizing a quote from Albert Einstein. I wondered, whether there is a nice tool to dig down into the fonts by filtering script-like fonts and have a decent way to dig deeper with some kind of look-alike function ("show me more fonts similar to this one").

To all the design pros out there: How do you choose the right font from a multitude of fonts? Are there any - ideally cross-platform - tools, that you would recommend? 

Curious Vince ...

[MikeW]

Hi Vince,

MyFonts has a font based on Einstien's hand writing. In a text run not too long it's reasonably legible.

There's been several attempts to recognize font shapes/characteristics and supply similar ones. I've never really been satisfied with the picks in general.

I categorize fonts as I add them to my font manager. For instance, for Script fonts I have 5 separate groups and the script fonts are in at least one of the categories but often in two or more. So I have a particular script font in Script - Connected but it may also be in the Script - Formal category.

Anyway, I have 6k+ fonts in the main folder my font manager is connected to and I am fairly familiar to what I have and generally in which of the 40 or so categories. When I start a job I usually have sketched out particular elements. I know the "feel" I am going for so I tend to look in the appropriate categories, make a temporary group named for the project. And sometimes I'll just scan the alphabetical listing in the font manager at a pretty quick rate and add any that are of a shape I hadn't considered. Then activate them, and test the verbiage with those and settle on one. Then the client may ask for a different direction and the process begins again.

Do note I rarely do logos (other than recreate crappy jpg versions). But I think I would go about it the same way as regards having fonts categorized in my font manager.

Mike

[Fixx]

I have not done this for ages (at the moment I have "some" set active and make do with it – weird how far you can get with reasonably limited selection) but I used to have a font application or two which can display non installed fonts with user defined phrase and size. Useful when designing mastheads and logos. Just write your phrase (for example "Newco"), set size to fill screen nicely and start pressing arrow key. FontVista was one that worked well but I think there are new ones also.

[Alfred]

This article describes a number of online tools. Some only compare fonts from a preset list such as Google Fonts or Typekit; others allow you to compare fonts installed on your computer.

You can purchase a complete Google Fonts catalogue (PDF) from here for US$4.95, but I don’t know whether you get free updates when the collection changes.

[Vince42]

Thank you very much everybody! I will try some tools online and on my computer. I guess the combination of tools always depends on the specific demands of a project, so that there is no "good for all" tool or combination of tools. The information were very interesting though.