Font & Tags

The one major issue that the ArtWalk design raised in relation to the CHaSSMM analysis model is, when you've completed your research and analysis, picked apart your text, analysed images and completed a binary sheet for each person giving testimony (and could also be organisations), then what? I found myself back to where almost every other designer probably does: searching through the plethora of installed fonts, as well as searching for new fonts. This, as many designers will tell you, takes forever and is often a bit of a 'down the rabbit hole' experience.

So, in one way, the experience of designing The Rescuers for the ArtWalk has been really beneficial because it has highlighted this 'wall of fonts' experience. I began questioning what we could be doing within design practice instead. Can we use the key words identified, or the binary system's terms to help us to refine that search? Are there add-ons to programs that exist?

It was a very difficult search, bizarrely enough. There are multiple applications that will act as font books, but they don't allow you to categorise your fonts in your own way, nor will they act as add-ons to the programs, making type decisions in-program exercises. For example, if I'm looking for a font that is, for example, male, concrete, urban and hand-written, how can I type some of these in and be given a refined list?

I believe I might have come across an answer to this problem without needing to hire a developer! There's an extension to Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 called Font Hero, and after laying down the cash for it (which may or may not prove to be well worth it), I have installed it. It will take some time to create the tags for each font, but once this is done, it's a matter of simply going through the binary list for each one and checking them off, plus adding any other key terms, such as serif, hand written, and other descriptive terms specific to that font. Then, when new fonts are added, just add those tags as you go.

Although this only works with Photoshop CC 2015, a solution I think might help with using it in other programs is to do the searches in PS, then when a decision is narrowed down, add them into a project-specific CC Library.

I'll be working on this system as a complementary add-on to the CHaSSMM analysis model, and experiment with it in practice, so the proof if yet to be pudding'ed, but I'm hopeful that this might present a great solution to the issue of narrowing font selections to project-specific criteria.