The Holy Grail of typeface selection...

Font Tagging Please!

By font tagging, I don't mean stencilling Aachen Bold on a wall like Banksy. No no no—I mean adopting the near-ubiquitous of Web 2.0 pursuit of tagging data and objects with keywords so that they are easier to find.

A little background for those of you going 'wtf?'; On-and-off recently I've been collating my burgeoning and disparate collection of fonts (I won't say how many but it's a lot) with FontAgent. And it's a really large amount. As a typographic designer I do keep an unhealthy amount of font names hard-wired into my head, but even The Biggest Font Monkey In Geekdom™ has problems remembering them all. At one time in the heady days of ATM deluxe on OS 9 I actually had my fonts organised by kind (Fraktur, Transitional, Script, Modernist, Retro, etc), but OS X came out, ATM became obsolete and I was back to square one.

So FontAgent has done it's thing and I've rooted out all the crap and duplictates and sorted them by foundry.
But not by 'kind'...

I could spend another weekend-or-three sifting them all and making sets-sorted-by-kind manually — but that's not the really the point. The foundaries should be doing this. If you show up at the iTunes store looking for music you look in categories, find what you want and buy it. Then, when you look in your iTunes database - there it is - in a genre category, and customisable by you too if you'd rather categorise it as 'Crunk' rather than 'Ghetto-tech'. I want to be able to do the same with my fonts. I'm not getting any younger, I want to type 'Swiss' or 'post modern' or 'bad 90's digital' and be rewarded with a list of fonts I can actually use, rather than an unforgivingly inpenetrable A-Z list that requires a full hour just to find a suitable compliment to Frutiger as a display font.

So my appeal to all font foundaries and font management application developers is a simple one: Tag the bloody fonts so people can find them! Or let them tag them themselves with an ID3-style system!
Needle. Haystack. Sorted... Come on now - it's not rocket science!

Tags:Tagged Fonts