I don’t know who designed the font menu in every application ever… but seriously folks. We can do better than that.
Every time I need a new font, I try to quickly browse through the entire list of fonts on my PC, and it inevitably ends up taking at least an hour of flipping from one font to the other only to finally realize I can’t remember which font it was that I really liked 30 tries ago. There’s just no way to see the fonts that are on my PC easily. Every single style in every friggin family gets its own special spot in the flyout menu for me to scroll past, and then I get to scroll through twenty dozen Chinese alphabet fonts that I never need. Then, when I’m finally past the Chinese characters, huzzah! There’s the Korean fonts that I never need.
When I finally find a font that I might like, I choose it only to find that the letter ‘p’ looks stupid, or it’s just completely and fantastically illegible. So, I start back at the top and really wish I could remember which font I liked an hour ago. The struggle is real folks.
I looked around for infographics or posters that would help, but couldn’t really find what I was looking for, so I just made this instead. This chart depicts the interesting fonts I have on my machine, including a sample title, and a pangram to indicate what all 26 letters look like. (There’s also an anatomy cheat sheet, and font size chart to help me remember just how big 72pt font really is.)
I think it ended up looking pretty cool, and decided to toss it up here in case it’s useful for someone else. So, until some of you UX gurus think up a solution to the font menu flyout list of death… I’ll just tape this to my wall and go from there.
P.S., most of these fonts are either pre-loaded on my PC, or came from 1001 free fonts.com.
