- Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to my channel.
If you're new here, my name is Charli
and I make videos about design.
This video in particular is going to be
a very design nerd video.
We're gonna talk about font organization.
I think it was in my 15-minute poster challenge video.
You guys saw a little bit of a glimpse
of how I organize my fonts
and a few people asked in the comments
for a video explaining the organization system
and getting some tips on that.
And so, that's what this is.
Should be pretty quick
because there's not all that much to show,
but hopefully it'll be useful.
Collecting fonts is a very designer thing to do.
We like to gather fonts that we see online
to use in our projects
and I'm always downloading a font,
even if I don't have a specific project for it yet,
I like having it there so it's an option
when I come to my next one.
And that means that you need
a good, solid organization system in place
so that when you do start a new project,
you know where to find all these fonts
or just have them organized in a way
that makes it easy to scan through them
and look for inspiration
when you're deciding what font to use.
I have my laptop here and I'm gonna show you around
Font Book, which is the built-in Apple app
that I use to organize my fonts.
There's other ones you can get and use instead
if you prefer, but honestly,
this one works absolutely fine for me.
So, this is what I'll show you today.
So this is Font Book.
When you open it for the first time,
it'll come with a few folders.
So it'll have this All Fonts,
which has all your fonts in it.
It'll have Computer Fonts.
They are the ones that come pre-installed in your computer.
And then it'll have User,
which are all the fonts that you have added
to your Font Book.
I don't really touch this Smart Collection section
but what I do use a lot is the collections
that you can set up yourself.
So as you can see here, I've got quite a few
and I arrange my fonts in two different ways.
First of all, I'll arrange them
by the foundry that I got them from.
There's a couple of sites that I talked about
in my top three resources for fonts video,
something like that, it'll be linked on a card anyway.
But there's a few sites that I always head to
as my first port of call
when I'm looking to download a new font.
And I have two of them set up in here.
So I've got The Designers Foundry
and I've got Vintage Type Co.
So this is a folder that I made myself
just by pushing the little plus button down here.
And then I drag the fonts into it.
So whenever I download a new font
from one of these foundries,
I will drag it into this folder.
So that's one way to keep it organized.
If you've got certain sites
that you always download fonts from,
make a collection for it and put them all in there.
Organizing them like this is a really good way
to remind yourself of the rights
of the font you use as well.
If you get them from dafont.com for example,
a lot of those fonts are only free for personal use,
and so, yeah, putting them in that folder
will just remind you to check before you go ahead
and use it in a project.
Anyway, the next set of collections that I have
all describe the font itself.
So this is what I tend to mostly reach for
because I know when I'm working on a project, for example,
that I want a sans serif font
to use for the body for this one.
So then I can simply just head to my Sans Serif folder
and from there I can pick from
my preferred sans serif fonts.
There are obviously way more sans serif fonts than this
on my computer because a lot of them do come installed,
but these are the ones that I personally prefer to use
and like to reach for in my projects
and so that's why I've arranged them in this way.
Arranging fonts like this makes it really easy
to quickly scan for inspiration,
you know, rather than scanning through this whole list here
of a million different fonts.
That's an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.
Or even just looking through the dropdown menu
in Illustrator or Photoshop or whatever you're using.
It's so much easier just to scan a list of fonts
that are the exact type of font that you're looking for.
Whenever I, for example, start my weekly vlogs
and I wanna do the titles for them,
I generally use a script font for the day
and so I might just come in here
and use my arrow key to just go down through the folder
and see what I've got to work with.
Let's just quickly run through my folders.
They're all pretty self-explanatory.
There's Condensed, which is like,
condensed typefaces, obviously.
Decorative, which has more fonts that I would only use
on very rare circumstances.
Like this one here has all these shaded bits on it.
Display Sans Serif, which are ones that
generally wouldn't be useful for body copy.
So this one here, for example, is quite thick
and I probably wouldn't want to type a paragraph in it
but it could look nice for a heading.
Display Serif, same thing but with serif fonts.
Google Fonts, oh actually,
this one should have an underscore behind it.
Let's add that.
So those are fonts that I've downloaded
from Google's font library to use in web projects.
Retro, ones that have a bit of an old-timey vibe
that I've used for a project in particular.
Sans Serif, my Script fonts, my Serif fonts,
these are the serifs that would be suitable
to use as body copy.
And then Theme, which is just ones that I would use
on very, very rare occasions if I was going for a certain,
like western theme for this one
or something digital, using it on a clock face or something.
So whenever I install a new font,
I just put it into whatever relevant category it has.
I'll just quickly show you how easy it is
to put a font in one of these folders.
You simply select it.
Usually I go to my User tab here
because I know I'm the one who's installed it.
You can use the search bar to find it as well.
This is a new one that I got from Vintage Type Co.,
so I'm going to drag that into here
and now it's in there and I'm also gonna put it
in my script folder.
Then if I go in, you can see it's in this place
and it's also in the Scripts.
So it's really easy to do.
It's just a case of remember to drag it into
the right folder after you install
but it's worth putting the effort in
because it is gonna make working on projects much easier
when you can easily scan a list of the types of fonts
that you're looking for.
So that is how I organize my fonts.
Thank you for watching this video.
I hope it was useful.
I know it seems very, very simple and it is very simple,
but it's a good thing to get in the habit of
because as your font collection grows
and you collect more and more,
things will get a little bit messy
if you don't start organizing it from the beginning.
So, keep that in mind and go organize your fonts I guess.
Give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it,
and make sure you hit subscribe if you're new to my channel.
I wanna tell you that recently I launched
a line of screen printed posters in my online store,
which I'm very excited about.
They're all designs that I've created
and then printed myself, hand screen printed onto paper,
to make posters to hang on your wall
and I think they're pretty cool,
I think you'll like them.
So go check them out if you haven't seen them already.
I purposefully don't put ads on these videos
because I don't want you to have any interruptions
when you start watching one and want to be learning.
I don't want you to be watching an ad instead.
So, buying a poster would be a great way
to support my channel if you enjoy it,
but if not, that is absolutely fine too.
I really appreciate the thumbs up
and let me know about your font organization situation
down below in the comments as well.
Maybe you've got some mess to confess.
That didn't mean to rhyme.
Or maybe you've got some other suggestions
of ways that I could organize my fonts
that you might wanna share.
So leave that down below and let's have a chat.
Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.
Bye.