Welcome to the March Edition of Organize Your Pad.  This month, we’ve been discussing Fonts a bit in the forum and I’ve discovered a couple of interesting things.  First of all, there are many of you that are just as addicted to Fonts and Font Collecting as I am.  Second, there are many of you who are just as unorganized in your storage/use of them as I am, hehe…

And that’s OK!  Today, I’m gonna share a bit about the organization options out there for your fonts, but also do a little enabling with some favorite fonts, both free and for sale.

I have about a Gazillion and one fonts and, honestly, I probably only use about 25% of them regularly.  So, why do I keep them all on my hard drive just to slow down my PS/PSE?  Good question.  Really, what I should be doing it storing them in a good Font Manager and only pulling in the ones I need for my pages.  Right?  Right.  

So, what font manager would be good for this?  I’m glad you asked…

From our discussion, there were only a couple of peeps who actually use Font Managers.  Monica uses High-Logic MainType and Lorry uses FontExpert.  Both of these are Windows Only.  I work on a Mac and use the FontBook that comes with my system.  And I really like it.

Anyhow, a few other potential programs are Nexus Font (Windows; Free), Font Explorer (Windows/Mac; basic Free version), The Font Thing (Windows; free) and Fonts by Bohemian Coding (Mac; $9.99)  Honestly, I suspect that there are not as many programs for Mac because Font Book is so adequate, but I’m sure you can find others if you are not enamored enough with it.

OK.  So you have a program installed.  What now?  The next step is setting up categories.  These are as individual as your tagging categories and should really reflect how you look for your fonts.  

My list looks like this…

Many of my fonts are in multiple categories.  That’s coolio.  Also, notice that some are “off”.  These are fonts that I just don’t ever use but am too chicken to delete.  I could totally turn WAY more off, and need to do so, but you get the idea.  

Having my fonts set up this way, I can just keep my Font Book open and it makes it super easy to find just the right font for the job.  

Another suggestion from Courtney in the Organize Thread was the use of wordmark.it.  It is super fun, free and is in the cloud, therefore taking up no hard drive space.  Yay.  Font Book (and I’m sure other programs) show previews of course, as does PS/PSE itself, but this way you can sort of see everything at once.  I like it.

That just makes my heart sing, LOL.  Now that we have our Font Manager and have taken a few minutes *cough* hours to get our fonts organized, we just need to place each new font we download in their appropriate categories and voila… Organization Magic.  Doesn’t it feel good?

And just to add to our work, here are a few fonts suggested in the thread that are tested and tried by The Lilypad Peeps!

And there are SO MANY MORE!  Karen reminded us that Heather, our resident Font Master, has a FREE FONT on her Facebook Page right now… so be sure to check it out!  And go through this thread for more suggestions.  We’d love to hear your favorites as well!

Enjoy and Happy Scrapping!