As I’ve been loading up my new hard drive, it’s been a great time to take inventory of what I have had installed on my system and what I actually use. I’m trying to pare things down where I can to keep my laptop running well. When your hard drive is bogged down, it can slow your system down. Going through your library of fonts can be a bit tedious, but also very helpful. A lot of fonts come pre-installed with word processing programs, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep them on your hard drive. Just delete the ones you don’t like (or move them to a backup folder). There are also ways to delete the fonts that come with your computer system, but I’m not going to get into that because I want to keep those and it’s a little tricky. I’ll address font organizers in a few paragraphs.
I recently did a post over on The Daily Digi about using fonts for titles and it reminded me just how much I love fonts! Finding the “perfect” font for a layout gives me a lot of satisfaction. I pay a lot of attention to fonts and when I read the credits on a layout I often check to see what font they used. I also love it when digital designers include font information in their TOU file. I’m constantly hunting for great fonts and I have found several favorites that I just can’t do without. I think you will get an idea when you look at my current list of installed fonts (which I will share with you later in this post).
FONTOLOGIE FONTS:
Fontologie fonts are how I met Steph at The Daily Digi. Several years ago she sold her fonts at The Shabby Shoppe where I was (and still am) a creative team member. Her Fontologie fonts quickly became the go-to fonts for many of my layouts. I love that they are bold enough to stand up to title work without overpowering a page. I followed her as a customer when she moved to Scrapbook Graphics, and later when she moved to The Daily Digi. I still use her fonts all the time and you will see them often on my layouts. When I found out Steph was a part of The Daily Digi I knew it would be a great site! I became a team member at The Daily Digi last April and started writing guest posts for them last summer and I’m now a regular contributor there. In a way, I guess you could say her fonts changed my life!
Fontologie fonts are very reasonably priced and many come in both personal and commercial use versions. Fontologie fonts are the only fonts where I can honestly say that I love and use each and every one of them. I’m not sure I can even pick my favorites but if you need a list of a few “must-haves” to get you started here are some suggestions:
- Textura (I especially like the traced version)
- Messy Bessy (I use this one a ton!)
- Howie’s Stamps (love the lowfat!)
- Haphazard (a new favorite of mine)
- Empty Wrapper (great for titles)
- Giggles (which happens to be the signature font of The Daily Digi)
FONT ORGANIZERS:
Here’s the scoop – I haven’t generally liked font organizers. There’s a helpful article on font organizers from Steph at The Daily Digi if you want to refer to it. There is also a good review of 25 different font tool organizers by Smashing Magazine. I tried to download a few of the free ones and was not happy with them. I also found it very difficult to find download links for a few others. I finally gave up. If you have a good font organizer (especially for free) I would love to hear about it!
Fonts installed on my computer:
click on each image to make it bigger
That’s a list of approximately 520 fonts! I know I don’t use more than 10-20% of that amount. I guess I need to get a good font organizer so I can free up some space in the old font folder!
