The art of arranging type is perhaps one of the most important studies for a graphic designer. Typography is such a complex and sophisticated examination, you can easily lose yourself in the finer intricacies of this study. You can also amass quite an extensive personal library of type faces and spend exorbitant amounts of time hunting and sifting for the right font.

This is where font management software comes in handy. Or at least, that has been the idea.

Personally, I have found managing my fonts to be somewhat burdensome. The issue for me has been less about balancing shear volume and more about having quick and easy access to the particular font I am looking for. And more so, for the font I don’t know I’m looking for. To this day, I have not found a solution that handles either of these particularly well, but I’ve narrowed the pickings down to two font managers that seem to do it better than most, Lynotype’s FontExplorer X Pro and Bohemian Coding’s Fontcase.

FontExplorer X Pro

I was eager to try out the new FontExplorer X Pro, which was released by Lynotype early last month. The previous, free version FontExplorer X was pretty good and the Pro version was set to introduce new features, better functionality and compatibility with a network service for font sharing and management over a closed network.

Overall, FontExplorer X Pro is pretty easy to use. It is compatible with both Mac OS 10.4.x and 10.5.x. The application view is pretty straightforward, if not a little boring. It is familiar and easy to use, and it allows you to sample fonts and customize how your sample is displayed, down to kerning and color.

FontExplorer X Pro

Some of the nicer features of FontExplorer X Pro are, smart sets and activation control with application-based sets. With smart sets, you can create custom font sets based on a number of criteria. This could be by Family Name, by path, by designer, by comment and so on. With activation control for application-based sets, you can automate the activation and deactivation of fonts, based on which applications you are using at any given time. For instance, you may have a considerable number of fonts you only use when working in Photoshop or Illustrator. With activation controls, you can have these fonts deactivated unless you are using one of these applications.

Another nice feature of the FontExplorer X Pro is having direct access to the Lynotype store, where you easily add to your library. This is particularly nice when working with the available plugins for Illustrator and Photoshop.

On the down side, FontExplorer X Pro does not allow you to contextualize your fonts much with meta data, which seems like a no-brainer requirement. While having the manufacturer, designer, font name and style are all important as meta data goes, on a practical day to day stand point, they have little value to me. On the other hand, adding my own meta data, in the form of tags, would be hugely useful.

There is one painful and limiting workaround, but again, it is painful and limiting. You can use the custom comment field for individual fonts as a single tag field and manually enter a specific tag for each font inn your collection, such as ‘slab’ or ‘sans-serif’ or ‘retro’. Then, you can either sort your list columns by comment or set up smart sets for your tags. Again, very tedious and it prevents you from identifying a font as both ‘sans-serif’ and ‘retro’, for example.

Fontcase

Following my quest for a good font manager that makes use of meta data and tagging, I came across Fontcase, by Bohemian Coding. Touted as being “designed to be an iTunes for your fonts”, Fontcase is a beautiful application that provides multiple views of your font information, including: thumbnails, lists, detailed inspections and glyphs and comparative side by sides. In addition, it divides these views into character, header text and body text, not to mention viewing fonts by tag and genre.

Fontcase Font Meta Data Form

Fontcase List View

Fontcase Thumbnail View and Character Glyph Detail

Fontcase Comparative Side by Side View

Aside from the most comprehensive application of meta data for font management and the added bonus of a full-featured glyph table built right in, Fontcase allows you to share your fonts libraries in the same way you share iTunes, without the need for a centralized server and with a preview option before downloading fonts, and it allows for beautiful printing of all of your fonts, together with their meta data, in your own paper font book. This I thought, was extremely cool.

Drawbacks? Well, there are a few. One, there is no direct access to a store to buy new fonts and two, there are subsequently no plugins for design applications to help you find missing fonts. For me, that’s not all that bad. The primary thing I want my font manager to do, is help me manage my fonts. Fontcase does an awesome job at this.

Fontcase is compatible with Mac OSX 10.5 or higher.

The Future of Alphabet Soup

So where does this leave the future of font management software? This has been obvious to me for quite some time, but I think for now, Fontcase is doing a pretty good job and definitely headed in the right direction. However, if you know of a better tool out there or have your own way of managing fonts, please drop a note. I’d love to hear what others are using and why.

The search for new sans-serif fonts is always a chore for me. Finding a sans-serif font, that has the right balance and play in its characters and does not assign meaning or dominate the stage, is perhaps the great challenge of the graphic designer. This is why, time and time again, I return to Helvetica.

That said, I thought I’d share three new fonts I acquired, that definitely show some promise and got me excited (and they are all free, which is a bonus).

AUdimat

AUdimat is clean and centered, with a crispness that is neither too sharp nor too boxy for practical use. Characters are well thought out and relate to each other nicely. The intriguing cuts and rises, make for a unique experience. AUdimat works best at larger sizes.

Blue Highway

Don’t let the name fool you. I wasn’t initially very drawn to Blue Highway, but after playing with it for a while I grew quite attached. Set in all CAPS, it reads much like, well, a highway sign. But set in lower or proper case, and you instantly find something refreshing in the descenders, how they are interrupted or cut short.

Reznor

Reznor caught my eye from the beginning for it’s unusual use of reverse letter “n” in the upper case. Inspired by Nine Inch Nails, this could easily have been just as bad, but it’s not. It’s really just Arial, with a few refinements. One such refinement is the elimination of upper case letters, which for me, solves 70% of the problems I have with Arial. The rest seem to be addressed with much better form and understanding of balance. It’s everything Arial should have been, as an alternative to Helvetica. (did I mention I hate Arial?)

All in all, not such a bad start to a day. What gets your goat? What floats your boat?