What are font managers?

As a designer, you have to work with fonts on a constant basis. Simply selecting a font out of the various options available can sometimes appear to be daunting. The font managers make it so much easier to organise these fonts. With features like syncing, font managers make it easier for a team to collaborate.

Why use font managers?

Now, that we know what font managers are and some of their major features, let's see why we should use these. Aside from making collaboration and organising easier, these managers also give you access to tons of fonts and some go a step further and provide you with things like icons too! You can also preview a font before using it, similar to how you would on the Google Fonts website.

Right Font

With Right Font you can also sync your fonts with your team and can favorite any font. It automatically syncs fonts from Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit. You can also access different icons that you can use for your designs, it is a really nice app.

Font Base

FontBase is a font manager app. With it you can share fonts with your whole team just by adding them to any cloud folder. You also have access to any font from Google's library in a single click. It is a really interesting tool with many hidden features.

Typeface 2

Typeface is a font manager for macOS that lets you organize font collections and it has a minimal UI. It also has a dark mode.

Work with Font Manager

For this exercise, we will use RightFont and Sketch. If you don't have them, you can download them and use their trial versions.

Once installed, let's open RightFont. Go to the left side bar and select All Fonts so you can have a quick preview of all the fonts installed on your machine.

Normally when you are designing a brand you will like to see how the name of the brand looks like in different types of fonts. With RightFont, you can do that by typing any kind of word in the box that is located in the top right of the screen. In my case, I will type 'design code'. Automatically, you will see that the word will be shown in different types of fonts.

Now let's put both apps, Sketch and RightFont next to each other. Add a text in Sketch with the words Design Code. If you'd like to see how your font changes in Sketch, RighFont has a small shortcut that lets you change the text in Sketch directly from RightFont. This makes your workflow more efficient

Conclusion

Having your fonts organized is a key step to efficiency in your workflow. It is interesting how much time you can save when you can easily see what type of fonts are being used at the spot.