Do you salivate at the sight of a particularly well designed font? Do you have over 1,000 fonts installed on your computer? Are you up late at night, trying out your own lines of text on font sites to see what they would look like?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, you most likely suffer from a specific affliction shared by others in your field. You, my friend, have a font fetish. Since there is no known cure for this disease, you might as well accept that you have a problem and have fun with it.
To fuel your addiction, we’ve put together some useful sites for those of you who are too far gone to save.
GET YOUR FONTS
FontBundles
OMG, have you visited this site yet? Full of ludicrously good deals and well-crafted fonts, they have daily deals and heavily discounted bundles of gorgeous fonts.
$1 Deals and Discounts
Join this Facebook group for more good deals, great information sharing, and tons of links to follow.
MyFonts
A trusted site with elegantly designed fonts. Definitely a go-to when you’re looking for a premium font for a specific use.
DaFont
You can get free and donationware fonts here. Be careful though, if a font says it’s free for personal use, don’t use it for commercial projects.
GLYPHS
Glyphs are extra goodies you get with some font packages–flourishes, swirls, swashes, and more. Designbundles.net has some great tutorials on how to access these and put them to use in your designs.
- Accessing glyphs on your PC
- Accessing glyphs on your MAC
- Accessing font glyphs and pairing fonts
- How to use glyphs in cricut design space
- How to use access glyphs and swashes in Photoshop
- How to use glyphs in Adobe Illustrator
MANAGING AND ORGANIZING YOUR FONTS
So, you have a million different fonts at your fingertips, but how do you manage or organize them? For most of us, it’s hard to choose the right font without being able to see it in action, and picking from a dropdown list in Photoshop isn’t always helpful.
Want to see the text in every font you have on your computer? Check out Wordmark. Enter the text you’re using for your project, and it displays it in all the fonts you already have.
NexusFont automatically accesses and displays all fonts that are installed on your computer. The program presents a scrollable list of fonts that displays whatever sample text you like. You can view the fonts in different colors, sizes, and styles, as well as turn antialiasing on and off. NexusFont also displays metadata–the font’s version, foundry, and so on–and you can add your own tags to the fonts.
Maintype is a powerful font manager that offers a straightforward and easy-to-use interface to help you maintain your fonts. It includes features for novice users who just want to view and install fonts as well as advanced features for graphic designers and typographers.
TRUE TYPE OR OPEN TYPE?
Ever wondered which file type you should download? True Type Fonts (TTF) or Open Type Fonts (OTF). This article will help you choose.
TTF Fonts vs. OTF Fonts… which one is better?
DESIGNING YOUR OWN FONTS
And finally, if you’re so far gone that you actually want to design your own typeface, check out this article filled with tips on how to create your own font.