During the past 7-8 years dedicated to web and graphic design I gathered loads of fonts.
I have thousands of them, they spread through long folder names and many many subfolders. There are serif fonts, sans-serif, dingbats, ornaments, pixel fonts, famous fonts, crappy free fonts, anything, you name it.
There are so many that if I need to find a proper font for a project, I have to browse all of them, by hand, with the keyboard. This process usually takes more than one hour, only to end up with a shortlist of 3 to 5 fonts suitable for my purpose.
More than often, I notice that out of this shortlist most of the fonts are done by well established foundries. There’s rarely any “exotic”, weird name font there. And even if it is, the limited set of chars, the bad kerning or the frequent problems in the shapes of the letters end up convincing me to ditch the “exotic” font in the favor of one created by professional typographers.
Taking into consideration all the above facts, I am going to change my font sorting strategy. Instead of focusing on quantity, I’ll start focusing on quality. I will create a separate set of carefully chosen fonts and font families and I’ll think twice before
adding a new one to the set. In time, this will build a narrow set of quality fonts (think hundreds and not thousands).
They should be easier to browse and the efficiency will be higher.
If the quantity of the quality is less then the quality of the quantity you’re have to rethink it all over again
In all seriousness, this has been an enlightening post for all us font loving people or at least us people generally looking for a font and having that moment where we have to double click one of them fonts.
I prefer Quality than Quantity.