How to manage fonts.

Font management

品牌设计

Font legibility

Managing and organizing a font library can be a time-consuming task. Admins and creatives may spend eight hours or more per week sorting through thousands of font files, tracking which ones are right for each project or client, sharing them with the team, installing fonts on multiple devices, and keeping tabs on licenses to avoid legal issues.

With an efficient system for font management, organizations save time and money while creatives are able to focus on their most important work—creating exceptional designs.

Not sure where to begin? Here’s our comprehensive primer on how to manage fonts.

Consequences of poor font management.

A disorganized or nonexistent font management setup impacts your team’s productivity in numerous ways:

It disrupts creative flow.

Searching for and testing fonts takes a lot of time, and can even be mentally draining—it’s no simple task to seek out and download fonts every single time you need to use them. Design software like Adobe Illustrator also tends to slow down as more fonts are added to it, so expect more delays (unless you’re using a font manager that automates activating and deactivating fonts).

It impedes collaboration.

Collaborating with a team adds another layer of complexity to the way you manage fonts. To maintain a cohesive visual identity, all creatives should have access to the same font library and font usage details.

It complicates compliance.

On the administrative side, ensuring correct font installation, usage, and license compliance contributes even more tasks to your workload. Font license management requires you to track usage agreements and renewal dates for each font in your library to avoid potentially costly legal issues. This is easy enough with just five or ten fonts, but if your font collection contains hundreds of styles, some license documents are bound to fall through the cracks.

Tips for effective font management.

Here are some tips that’ll help you manage your font library more efficiently:

Organize by font types.

You can start by organizing your font collection into logical font lists or folders, based on whichever criteria is most useful: by size, weight, and style, by project, or by client. It helps to have a font specialist on your team who understands the qualities that each font family shares with others. The goal is to make it easy for your team to find the fonts they need in minutes.

Here are some of the ways that industry professionals categorize their fonts:

Start with the main categories.

Begin by creating main font folders for various general categories, e.g.:

Serif
Sans serif
Script
Display
Symbols

These broad groupings establish a foundation for your font organization system before you begin to create more detailed categories.

Subcategories.

Establish subcategories within each main category to further refine your font organization. For example, under the serif category, you might have more specific categories like transitional, old style, and slab serifs.

Tagging.

Assign descriptive tags to each font for specific attributes like bold, italic, handwritten, or condensed—whichever font features are most relevant to your creative needs.

Preview.

Create preview sheets or sample sheets for each font, including the font name, style variations, and a character set. This visual reference can be immensely helpful as you browse your font collection.

File naming.

Use a clear, descriptive, and consistent format to name your font files. Include relevant information like the font name, designer, and style variations to facilitate future font identification and retrieval.

Organize by font license.

Organizing fonts by license is another way to go. This strategy prioritizes compliance, helping you keep track of which fonts are licensed for which use cases. Here are some key strategies for effectively organizing your fonts by license:

Understand the license types.

Familiarize yourself with different font license types, such as commercial, free for personal use, open source, and trial versions. These will serve as a guide as you organize fonts based on their licensing restrictions.

Create license-specific folders.

Set up folders in your font library dedicated to specific license types. This allows you to easily differentiate between fonts that require commercial licensing and free fonts for personal use, for example. Streamlined font organization makes it easy to choose the right font depending on the type of asset you're working on.

Maintain detailed records.

Keep a list of the license agreements and terms associated with each font, including license type, restrictions, and any renewal or expiration dates. This ensures that the information is easily accessible, making it easier to avoid any lapses.

Regularly review and update your collection.

Periodically set aside time to review your font collection for any licenses that have expired or are in need of renewal. Uninstall fonts with expired or invalid licenses to maintain compliance with copyright law.

Use font management software to simplify your workflow.

Even with these tips, manually organizing a large font library can be time consuming. Thankfully, there’s font management software that can analyze font characteristics and automatically sort fonts into categories based on these characteristics. Most font managers also include other features for organizing, searching, and filtering fonts based on a variety of criteria, simplifying navigation and use of your font collection.

Where should I buy fonts for commercial use?

Rather than buying individual fonts—and attempting to keep track of each of their licenses over time and throughout your agency—you can streamline your typographic process by investing in a font subscription that includes a font manager, which centralizes all your fonts in one unified library.

Monotype Fonts is the premier all-in-one cloud-based font manager. With a Monotype Fonts subscription, you and your creative team gain instant access to more than 150,000 professional-grade fonts from the Monotype library and their foundry partners, plus built-in organization for your existing font collection.

Choose from a range of Monotype Fonts subscriptions for individuals, teams, and large enterprises to customize your plan for your commercial needs. Access every font type imaginable—and breathe easy knowing there’s no risk of that dreaded “missing fonts” error.

Built-in font management features.

A dedicated font management tool can be a game-changer for administrators. Monotype Fonts offers a streamlined experience by allowing creatives to activate and deactivate fonts with a simple toggle button. Active fonts are automatically available for use across a wide range of design software. You can also upload your existing fonts with a simple drag and drop.

Integrated licensing.

Monotype Fonts also integrates licensing into our subscription plans. This means that you’re only paying for fonts that you need, and that the fonts you’re using are appropriately licensed for your projects. Compliance is automatic, providing peace of mind and relieving the potentially costly administrative burden of manual license management.

To decide which plan would work best for your organization, visit the Monotype Fonts plans page.