My Fontbook Font Viewer
During these last few months I created and published an online font viewer that lets you browse through your catalog of installed fonts using only your web browser. The tool is called My Fontbook, and though it is primarily of use to designers, it is probably pretty handy for anyone trying to find an alternative to Times New Roman or Arial when drafting documents.
A brief anecdotal background…
I often do a fair bit of web design and layout as part of my duties as a freelance web developer. The aesthetic aspects of my work are a joy, but I feel like they can drag on for hours – days even – with no end in sight. The seemingly endless adjustments of a pixel here and a rounded edge there do not possess the finite nature of software programming. With software, it is complete when it works. Visual art does not have such a clear boundary.
Typography
At some point in the design process, usually early on, I go through the steps of settling on a combination of fonts to use. Usually this requires a heading font and then another typeface for the body content, and possibly a third or fourth font for sub-headings or navigational elements. I have a short list of my favorite fonts, but that does not stop me from opening Vector Designer, creating several text examples and then engaging in the meticulous process of applying nearly every font in my catalog to the example text.
After thirty minutes of this, I am typically left with a dozen or so typefaces from which to experiment with further. In January, I set out to find some font viewer software which would display my entire font catalog with samples and save me some time in the design cycle. There are many font management tools available on the market (some quite good), but I had to both pay a licensing fee and then install yet another program on my computer. If you have not heard before, the more crap that you install on your computer, the crappier it runs.
Font Viewer
I tried to find a font viewer online, that works from the “cloud” (in my browser), but there were not any suitable options. So in a effort to save myself fifity bucks, I spent considerable time making My Fontbook, and now you can use it for free.
If you use it, and you like it, leave me a comment on this blog.
link: My Fontbook font viewer