What’s The Best Way To Work With Adobe Fonts?

Adobe Fonts, formerly known as Typekit, gives you access to over 2500 font families for free with your Creative Cloud subscription. With an abundance of available Adobe fonts, why would you need a separate font manager? Our customers have asked us this question many times over the last few years, but the answer isn’t as straightforward as you might think. Here we explain the role of Adobe Fonts in your creative workflow, and why font management matters for teams of all sizes. Whether you’re a freelance graphic designer, a creative director for a global ad agency, or anything in between, this is for you.

1. If I use Adobe Fonts all the time, why would I need a font manager like Connect Fonts?

With so many fonts available through Adobe Fonts, a dedicated font manager becomes even more of a necessity. If you open the floodgates and add more than 2500 new font families into your collection, the need to organize and manage them becomes that much greater! One of the greatest benefits of font management solutions like Connect Fonts is having the ability to organize all your fonts, no matter which foundry they come from.

Why not just manage fonts from Adobe in Adobe Fonts?

• Once fonts are synced with a font manger like Connect Fonts, you can activate and deactivate those fonts without revisiting the Adobe Fonts site. Of course, you can always visit the Adobe Fonts site during a project, but why add an unnecessary interruption to your workflow? Better to organize all your fonts in one place, and that’s exactly what a font manager can do.
• Create sets within Connect Fonts to organize your fonts by project, document, or however you choose. Remember, this applies to all your fonts, including fonts from Adobe.
• With a dedicated font manager, you can activate and deactivate fonts when you’re offline, as long as you’ve previously synced them with one of your Creative Cloud apps.
• And with the right font manager for teams, it’s easy to share the right fonts with the right people at the right time. No need to tell your team, “Go to the Adobe Fonts site and activate ‘Helvetica’.” When you use the right font management solution, you can always share the correct fonts with confidence.

2. How will Adobe Fonts impact my creative workflow?

If you switch between your Creative Cloud apps and the Adobe Fonts site every time you need to activate a font, your productivity will suffer. If you’re constantly returning to the Adobe Fonts site during a project, even after you’ve selected your fonts, again you risk getting distracted.

Adobe Fonts can accelerate your creativity and streamline your workflow in the right situations:

When to use Adobe Fonts

• To explore unfamiliar fonts and font designers
• To research fonts before a project begins
• To visually explore fonts

When not to use Adobe Fonts

• To manage hundreds or thousands of fonts from a wide variety of sources
• To change fonts on the fly without jumping out of your design apps
• To select and purchase fonts for a project

3. Should I activate all the fonts in Adobe Fonts so I can use them any time I need them?

We wouldn’t recommend it. One of the most valuable aspects of a font manager like Connect Fonts is its ability to activate fonts ‘on demand,’ so only the fonts you need are in use. This keeps application font menus clean and concise, which makes finding the right font that much easier. Activating thousands of fonts at once could significantly slow down your operating system . That’s because fonts are activated globally across the entire system, and not on an app by app basis.

If you activate every font in Adobe Fonts to save time later, you’ll end up doing the opposite. Far better to activate each font as you need it and deactivate it once you’re done. This is where font managers shine.

4. “Adobe Fonts is all we’ll ever need,” and other font management myths

It’s tempting to rely on Adobe Fonts for all your font management needs, and why not? It’s an incredibly powerful tool for creative professionals, within reason. But based on the reasons we’ve shared above, there are lots of situations where it’s far better to use a font manager like Connect Fonts. Here are a few more reasons to consider:

• The imminent demise of PostScript Type 1 fonts. Adobe is ending support for PostScript Type 1 fonts in all its creative apps beginning in January 2023. You can’t search your font collection for PostScript Type 1 fonts within Adobe Fonts. But you can do this in a font manager like Connect Fonts. Identifying and isolating these fonts is the first step in ensuring they don’t derail your workflow down the road. Take the next step by reading our article on the demise of PostScript Type 1 fonts, or better yet, protect your work from the end of Type 1 support today with a free 15-day trial of Connect Fonts.
• Minimize creative chaos. Manage all your fonts in one place. While it’s easy to acquire fonts from Adobe, Google, and third-party foundries, you need the right tools to organize them. If your fonts are spread across multiple sites, hidden on local computers, and buried in emails, this will only slow down your creativity. Connect Fonts manages all fonts from all font foundries. And if you use a font manager like Connect Fonts, you can easily see all the fonts in your collection in one place.
• The risks of becoming overly reliant on Adobe Fonts. Occasionally, Adobe will retire font families from its collection. If you group all your Adobe fonts in a font manager like Connect Fonts, it’ll be easier to recognize when you use those fonts multiple times. In situations like this, it might be worth it to purchase those fonts directly from the foundries that created them. That way you’ll always be covered.

And there’s a more subtle risk to relying too much on Adobe Fonts. Many font designers will only make a few of their fonts available through Adobe. If you want to see all their fonts, you’ll need to go directly to their individual sites. And some font designers don’t resell their fonts through Adobe at all. Searching through Adobe Fonts is a great way to whet your creative appetite. But if you want to really satisfy your hunger, you’ll need to seek out font designers like Tré Seals, Jo Malinis, and Daniel Britton.

Adobe Fonts and the future of creativity

Your font collection is as unique as you, your business, and the types of challenges you solve for your clients. That’s why you need a font manager that’s foundry agnostic. One that lets you find the right fonts at the right time, no matter where you got those fonts in the first place. Get inspired by Adobe Fonts, but don’t limit yourself. It’s up to you to invent amazing.

Extensis customers manage over 7.5 million fonts with our font management solutions. And last we checked, about 26% of these were PostScript Type 1 fonts. We recently held a webinar on the demise of PostScript Type 1 fonts and how you can prepare for this titanic shift in the world of design.