Creating a list of favourite fonts in Photoshop

Question

I do a lot of design work, and I'm constantly using different fonts. Therefore I've built up a list of over 200 fonts in my directory.

Is there a way in Photoshop of creating a favourites short list of fonts (i.e., a bit like swatch in Illustrator for colours)?

It would save me so much time in scrolling down these every growing font lists.

Answer 1

You shouldn't have 200 fonts loaded all at the same time. They can bog down the system and the applications that use the font folders for menus, in addition to the problems you stated in trying to navigate the ever-growing menu.

You really need a separate font management tool of some kind to help you organize your fonts into sets of your liking. There are a number of them out there; Extensis Suitcase Fusion and FontXplorer Pro come to mind.

From the FontXplorer website...

Is font management for you? Font management is for anyone who uses more than just a handful of fonts.

Ask yourself these questions:

Do you need to free up your system? Every font that has been activated on your system requires the deployment of system resources to applications. This can be an unproductive use of resources, particularly for fonts that are used infrequently. Font management allows you to activate fonts solely for the period of time you actually need them, freeing up precious resources so your system can run more efficiently.

Do you have trouble maintaining an overview of your fonts? Every professional creative application you install adds new fonts to your system that you may or may not want. Font management helps you find, preview, and sort fonts and deactivate the ones you don’t need.

Answer 2

Well, if you've only 200 or so fonts, you're doing pretty well. Most designers I know have about 10 times that number, although most, like me, only use a small handful on a regular basis and keep the others for occasional use in display work.

There's nothing in Photoshop currently that allows you to build a "favorite fonts" list. When Photoshop opens, it asks the OS for the fonts it has to work with, then looks in an additional Adobe-specific font directory if that's present. So the problem is at the OS level, really.

I would suggest you get TypeDNA, which I helped beta test a while back. It is a unique and quite brilliant font manager that has great tools to help you pick fonts for a particular project or find fonts that harmonize with one another (for headlines vs. body copy, for example). And it's very inexpensive. While you're at the TypeDNA website be sure to check out the FontShaker page. This is an entirely unique (and fun) look at your fonts.

Answer 3

I tend to believe the more experienced of a graphic designer you become, the more likely you are to start thinking like Vignelli:

http://bigthink.com/ideas/19591

Of course, he takes an extreme stance and it's rarely one that makes sense literally. But designers do tend to form a toolbox of work-horse faces that they use 80% of the time. You could even probably consider it an example of the 80/20 rule-of-thumb. 80% of your typeface needs can be handled by 20% of your collection.

So I agree with the others. You probably don't want 200 fonts in your font menu. It's just clutter. Keep your 20-30 workhorse faces and then put all the rest into a font management tool with a categorization system that makes sense to you.