Font Organization: Enhance Creativity & Efficiency

Organizing fonts effectively is crucial for anyone working in creative industries. For individual designers and freelancers, an organized font library saves time, reduces stress, and leaves more room to focus on profitable activities. On a larger scale, creative teams can benefit from standardized font organization that minimizes administrative tasks and improves productivity. In short, better font organization means faster projects, happier clients and bosses, smoother creative operations, and more efficient, effective designers and creative teams.  

For IT and operations teams managing font usage across departments, organizing fonts by client, campaign, or style is crucial. By giving designers the flexibility to organize fonts as they see fit, while maintaining central control, IT departments can ensure consistency across projects without micro-managing. That means font organization increases the efficiency and productivity of both IT departments and the creative operations they support.  

This system not only boosts efficiency but also cuts down on support tickets. IT pros can spend less time fixing font issues and more time working on strategic initiatives that grow the business.

Explore how permission controls can streamline your team’s workflow by taking the Permissions Tour.

Font Organization’s Primary Benefits For IT Teams + Creative Operations:

• Fewer support tickets
• Increased efficiency
• Increased productivity
• Strategic focus on tech stacks 

Efficient font organization utilizes collections, sets, families, and libraries to help streamline creative workflows. 

• Font collections group related fonts for easy access.
• Font libraries are a common term for font collections that are curated for a specific purpose. They can be created for individuals or teams. Font libraries provide ready access to necessary and desired fonts, within the context of the collection. For example, a library titled “Our Favorite Client’s Q4 Campaign” should include all fonts considered and approved for your favorite client’s Q4 campaign, so that everyone on the team can access them. Extensis font solutions provide flexible font library organization options.
• A font set is similar to a playlist in a digital music player: the set is a list of fonts contained in the library, so adding fonts to a set or removing fonts from a set doesn’t change the library.
• A font family is a group of related typefaces that share design traits but differ in style or weight (e.g., bold, italic). Organizing by families keeps fonts consistent and easy to find.
• When it comes to data, tagging is the practice of applying words or short phrases to an asset, so that search functions can sift through options and serve up results relevant to the user’s search. This makes it easier for creative users to search and find fonts. Extensis Smart Tags automatically applies tags to all fonts in your collection, making it easy to quickly search within multiple libraries and sets.

Improved Workflow Efficiency: Organized fonts allow designers to quickly locate and use the desired and permitted typefaces, reducing the time spent searching for appropriate fonts and enhancing the overall design workflow.

Consistent Branding: Organizing and using specific fonts consistently across various projects helps organizations maintain a unified and recognizable brand identity, reinforcing brand recognition and recall.

Enhanced Creativity: Organized font libraries enable designers to explore and experiment with different typefaces easily, promoting creative diversity in design projects.

Reduced Errors: Proper font organization minimizes the risk of using incorrect or unauthorized fonts, reducing the likelihood of errors in design projects and preventing legal or branding issues.

Compliance with Licensing: Organized font libraries facilitate tracking font licenses, ensuring that fonts are used in accordance with licensing agreements, avoiding copyright infringement, and potential legal consequences.

Effective Collaboration: When fonts are organized, collaborating team members can access and utilize the same fonts, ensuring design consistency and minimizing the risk of font-related discrepancies.

Simplified Font Updates: Keeping fonts organized makes it easier to manage updates and replacements for outdated or problematic fonts, ensuring that projects continue to use the latest and most suitable typefaces.

Project Based (Highly Recommended)

• Consider creating project-specific libraries within your font repository. This can help keep fonts related to a particular project separate from your general collection.
• If working on multiple projects for the same organization or customer, consider using sub-folders to list out the projects under the customer or organization’s name.

Font Type or Classification (Recommended In Certain Instances)

• Group fonts based on similar characteristics like serif or sans-serif width style and intended use (body text, headings, logos, etc.).
• Create subcategories within larger categories to further refine your font organization.

Font Name (Not Recommended)

• Use font names to create a naming convention for your font files. This can help you quickly identify and locate specific fonts using an alphabetical list.
• You can also organize deeper using sub-folders with additional information such as font family, weight, and style.