Organizing Fonts

culpepper · 05-05-2008, 02:17 PM

I've stumbled into the world of graphic design and am putting together the pieces slowly. I have ATM Deluxe -- I'm not sure if this is the best way for organizing fonts. If there are better programs, I'd love to hear what others are using.

Here is my main question, though -- what categories are others using to organize your fonts? Serif vs Sans Serif seems a little too simple. Organizing them by the font developer seems too varied. Any ideas on how others have categorized them (maybe just for ATM user, maybe for others)? Let me know what you are doing so that you can find the right font without having to memorize all of the names.

I do know that Word and a lot of the Adobe programs show you a small sample of the font when selecting it -- but I can't imagine that you'd want to scroll through hundreds of these to find the right font.

corneo · 05-06-2008, 01:39 AM

Being once a Linotype typesetter (look the word up) we printed the fonts with their names on paper. Remember fonts are artwork. There are thousands of forgotten fonts out there. What you find now days are the most common or used. Organize them by the way that best works for you.

culpepper · 05-06-2008, 05:21 AM

I don't know if your post was intended to be helpful or shaming.

Back to the question of categories: Does anybody have fonts organized in categories for easier use? Let's saw you go through a bunch of free fonts on the internet and you like 100 of them. Chances are that you won't remember some of them when you are looking for a particular font later. If you keep adding on more and more, I would expect it to be quite a chore to have to scroll through a thousand fonts just to find something that fits what you are working on.