Font-tastic!

Mar 26, 2008

My Dad likes to say "You can never have too many fonts!" Or, more often, "You can never have too many couches!" which is of course absolutely untrue. It makes me think of that Shel Silverstein poem about the Man and Woman who couldn't have children so they didn't have anyone to take out the trash, and it just piled up around them until garbage was spilling out the windows and chimney. But I think I was talking about couches. No, I was talking about fonts, but leading into it with couches. Ah yes, now I remember! My point is, you CAN have too many. Sorry Dad. My parents had a room downstairs that was so full of couches we had to shove one of them into a closet just so we could have a little floor space. The same thing can happen with fonts. You find a cute one here, a perfectly themed one there, and why wouldn't I download it, it's free! And before you know it, you have fonts spilling out of your proverbial closets (where they got stuffed with the skeletons).
This happened to me. It can happen to anyone. If you don't know what the warning signs are, it could be happening to your banker or your neighbor or your sister and you would never know it. I had to go on a font diet. This was quite emotional for me. I love my fonts so. But I read somewhere that ideally you shouldn't have more than 300 fonts installed on your computer at once, as all the fonts are loaded for each application you have open. I had almost 1700 fonts. And it was really slowing down my computer. At least I think it was.
So I uninstalled 1000 fonts. And now all my internet fonts are different and it is tripping me out!
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Ok. Enough time has passed. I reset the factory installed fonts so everything is back to normal. At the same time I have slimmed down to a mere 126 fonts, thank you very much, and I am feeling pretty good about me. But let me tell you what has made this all possible for me. I downloaded a Font Manager program called "The Font Thing" and it allows me to see my fonts in ways I never thought possible. You can arrange them in categories, and also view the fonts that are NOT installed on your system, so that even if they aren't installed, they are not lost to you. Best of all, you can type in your page title or whatever it is you are fonting about, and it will display your title in each of the fonts. If you don't know what I am talking about, then you obviously aren't a font geek like me, but if you do know what I mean, then you also know how awesome that is. There are lots of Font Manager programs out there. Just do a search for "Font Manager" or "Font Organizer" and you are sure to find something you like. And now, I think I have talked about fonts way longer than was necessary. So I will leave you to your thoughts.