Organizing your thoughts about typefaces

Choosing the right typeface is crucial. A carefully selected font can give your work that desired special touch, and a bad font can ruin everything. We all know that. That's why typeface organization should play a major role when setting up your working environment.

You just simply can not remember the thousands of fonts shining through the ever expanding Gutenberg galaxy. So we know the importance of it, but still, we just copy every font into the same FONTS folder on our machine.

Of course there are font management applications, but they are just not enough. You are still searching through each and every one, when looking for that perfect font for your latest job, don't you? What is the most efficient way to keep everything in order in the long term? What categories you divide your typefaces into? I'm curious about your practice.

Before you fill up the comment-pool with your useful answers, let me introduce you an online application, called Identifont.

Originally the purpose of the site was to find a typeface which you saw somewhere but don't remember the name of it. Instead, I use it to organize my thoughts and feelings about a particular idea of a typeface.

Here you can type in the letters of your wannabe logotype, and start answering a few questions. Is it sans or serif? Is it handwritten or drawn with geometric precision? And so on. After you finish this little survey, the site will give you a selection of fonts which are the closest to your original idea. This can be a real time saver and a thought-provoking process too. Use it with What the font (as Ivan earlier mentioned), and you will get a killer combo for font-fighting.