Not so with Font Friend, a bookmarklet that simplifies the font selection process greatly. A click on the bookmarklet on any website will display it in an overlay in the lower left corner of the browser window. The font selector can be used to change various characteristics of the fonts used on a website. The options are divided into font family, font variant, font weight, text transform and a html element selector.

The html element selector defines the elements on the page that will be affected by the font change. Included are headline tags, body, paragraphs and the option to select a custom element.

The font family offers a selection of 23 different font families including the popular families arial, verdana, times new roman and georgia. Font variants can further change the appearance of the fonts on the active website.

Webmasters who are currently testing various fonts for their website might want to check out the bookmarklet which can be simply added to the bookmarks and executed by left-clicking it on the right website.

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With The GIMP, creating rudimentary 3D logos is painless…if you know the steps. And with a good collection of fonts you can make your clients think you have far more skills than you might actually have. With that in mind, let’s take a look and see just how simple it is to create a 3D logo with The GIMP.

How it works

The GIMP has a built in feature that helps you to create these logos. We will be working with version 2.6 – which is actually important because the engine that creates these has changed as well as the location of the submenu has changed. So if you don’t have 2.6, give upgrading a go.

The process is pretty simple.

• Select the type of logo you want to create from the Create menu.
• Enter all of the necessary information and select the configurations to suit your needs.
• Click OK
• Edit the image to suit your needs.
• Save the file.

Now let’s take a look at the process with a bit more detail.

The logo tool

Figure 1

To open up the logo tool go to the File menu and select the Create submenu. From with the Create submenu you will see the Logos submenu, click on that to reveal the different types of logos you can create (see Figure 1).

The different types of logos range from the cartoonish, to the professional, to the nearly-fantastical. There are quite a few choices so your best bet is to play around with them until you find the type of logo you prefer to work with.

Figure 2

Once you click on the logo type you want to create a new window will open. It is within this window that the logo is created. The good news is, you really need zero artistic skills to tackle this task.

Figure 2 shows all of the configuration options you will have to deal with to create a logo. Don’t let amount of options fool you, you really only need to work with a minimum of these to create your logo. Here’s what you’ll need to work with:

Text: This is what your logo will say.

Font: This is the font you want to use for your logo.

Blend Gradient(s): These will be the gradient colors you will use for your logo. You can create new gradients as well. The included gradients should be plenty to get you started.

Background Color: If you know the color of the background your logo will be going over you can change this here. I usually delete the background color so the logo is surrounded by a transparent border.

Figure 3

And that is the bare minimum you need. Once you have all of that filled out, click OK and the logo will be created.

Figure 3 shows a sample logo created using the Glossy logo tool, the Biometric Joe font,  and the Cold Steel 2 gradient.

Of course there are plenty more options to configure for your logo – but getting the hang of the basics will give you plenty to do with this tool.

Figure 4

TIP: As I mentioned I tend to remove the background in this logos. What this does is allow my logos to be placed on any color background. To do this go to the layer window of your new logo, select the background layer, and click the delete button in the layer window. When you save this image you will now want to make sure you save it in a format that supports transparency (such as .gif or .png.)

Final thoughts

I have used this method to create logos for plenty of clients. Not only does this make you a more versatile web designer, it also adds to the bottom line as you can now charge design fees.

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The font manager provides quick access to many useful features including the installation and uninstallation of fonts, copying and moving fonts or taking a look at a character map of that font. It makes use of an internal charmap but can also display the charmap of the operating system.

Fonts can be searched which becomes useful when working with font collections that consists of hundreds of different fonts. They can also be printed, saved as an image or renamed from the main interface.

Additional options include the search for duplicate fonts and the creation of backups before installing or uninstalling fonts. NexusFont is a great font manager for the Windows operating system. The only feature that it is lacking is to filter the Windows system fonts from the display to make it easier to distinguish between them and third party fonts.

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You don’t only get one font weight with only a few extra characters. You get the full deal, with different font weights, characters, and in some cases all characters have a unique shape (Delicious font). There are also some nice descriptions, which make me realize how hard font design must be. Apparently “The Delicious italic is not a slanted roman, but a true italic.”… No comment from me, I have no idea what he’s talking about, but the font looks awesome!

My favorite one is Museo and Diavolo. I love the elegance that the narrow Museo offers, especially in its thinner variants. Diavolo is probably one of the coolest fonts I’ve ever seen. Put a bold heading on any page in Diavolo and the font itself makes a statement instantly. My only problem is now that I can’t use these fonts in my web pages because few people have them, let’s hope css3 changes this and enables embedding of fonts properly. Anyway, these fonts are awesome, check them out and download them right now!

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Private characters are symbols which only work on machine on which they’re installed and correctly allocated. This may be useful if like a company logos or foreign script have to be frequently included into documents, and I expect it is more efficient than adding many images.

eudcedit.exe has minimal tools (a few simple shapes, a pencil, a brush and an eraser!), but it does allow a private character to be created in a fairly simplistic manner.

To use Private Character Editor, go to run and enter ‘eudcedit.exe’. Once it is open, you have to find an empty code point (an unused Unicode character) to use. Then, it is quite self-explanatory. After the character has been saved, to insert it, use Character Map.

Some virus scanners highlight this file as a trojan, but it comes with Windows so that is fairly unlikely.

The University of Heidelberg has a graphical tutorial on eudcedit.exe.

It is definitely worth noting that any characters you make on Private Character Editor will not work on any other computers, but it may still be useful should a symbol frequently be used.

(via Download Squad)

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It is easy to scroll through all installed fonts by selecting the first font in the list and using the mouse-wheel to move to the next one. Even better is the option to create a html file with previews for all installed system fonts. It is up to the user to customize the display by selecting the display text, size and attributes for each font.

A font can be uninstalled by right-clicking it in the fonts list and selecting Uninstall from the menu. Two options are available. The first will create a backup while the second will remove the font from the system without a backup. Users should make sure that they do not remove system fonts from the system to avoid problems that can arise from that.

It is also possible to move or copy fonts using the same context menu of the fonts browser. Fonts can also be previewed by using the file browser which is an explorer like interface that can be used to check the fonts of a selected directory. The font manager will automatically check if a font is installed on the system and inform the user if that is the case. Fonts can be installed by right-clicking them and selecting the Install option from the menu.

This is a great way of previewing many fonts in short time and installing those that pass the preview. The font manager is compatible to all NT operating systems, no word on 64-bit edition support though.

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Click Font is a small Open Source application that provides users with a better way to install fonts in Windows. The software adds an Install Font entry to the right-click menu when specific font related file extensions are selected.

The software can install True Type, Open Type and Postscript Fonts and register them correctly on the system. One nice feature is the option to install all fonts that are located in a specific folder which can be real time saver.

Click Font is compatible to 32-bit versions of Windows 2000, NT and Windows XP but should run under Windows Vista as well.

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A better use of a software that displays all fonts installed on the system is the overview to be able to pick only quickly for a presentation, letter or other purpose. Or could you name the differences between Arial, Times New Roman and Franklin Gothic Medium out of your head ? You could obviously just test them in the application that you write the text with but this usually takes way longer.

Hawkeye Font Browser is a free software for Microsoft Windows that requires the .net Framework 1.1. It’s a tiny 39 Kilobyte application that can be run from any location and immediately displays a sentence in all fonts installed on the system.

The user can enter a different sentence and pick a font size, color and select bold or underline letters. By the way, if you have more than 100 fonts installed on your system you might want to consider reducing them to speed up system boot times. Check out the article fonts increase system startup for additional information.

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Sizlopedia discovered a web service called What The Font that can identify the font that has been used in a particular image. Images can either be uploaded to the service or directly from a website. The image that has been uploaded to the server is then analyzed automatically and the user is asked for verification after that process.

Each font char is identified separately and the user can correct or add chars that have not been identified properly. The whole process, from uploading to analysis and manual correction does not take longer than a few seconds.

The matches that have been found are displayed on the next and final page. The original image is floating on top of the page scrolling with the site to speed up the comparison and final identification.

The thing that’s bothering me a little bit is that all fonts on that website are sold which means that you cannot download the font immediately. It’s still nice for identification purposes.

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New fonts can be nice for local websites or documents as well but I honestly was never a huge fan of that. Still, if you are looking for new fonts you should definitely take the time to visit the Font Cubes website which hosts an extensive font collection. Font cubes is a non-commercial website which does not mix free and commercial fonts like so many other font websites do.

A special feature is that the font is shown in its complete form and not only partially which is great if you are looking for a font that does have a specific char. Fonts are rated and the website offers several ways of listing fonts for the users. It is for instance possible to take a look at the most popular fonts, the highest rated fonts or the most downloaded fonts of the day.

Instructions on how to download and install the fonts are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

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You can basically do two things at FontStruct. The first and probably most exciting function is to create your own font set and share it with other users on the website and Internet. I really thought I would never say that but it’s actually fun to create your own font. Besides that it’s easy as pie to do it. You can select a letter set at the bottom, say Latin, Greek, Arabic or Hebrew and work your way through the letters, numbers and special characters until you are finished. You can always take a look at the results so far and correct any mistake that you might have made.

It does take some time if you consider that you have to create more than 80 characters for the Basic Latin font set alone but as I said it is well worth it and fun. A set of tools is available that should be known from image editors, you can copy and erase pixels, draw lines or rectangles and use special shaped pixels that are available in the left pane.

The second great function is the ability to share and download fonts from the website. Since the website is more or less unknown only 46 fonts are available right now, some of them however are fantastic. The website offers the typical community based functions like commenting and rating fonts or user avatars.

FontStruct is great fun combined with great value, what else could you want ?

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The free Powerpoint Viewer 2007 is installing several Windows Vista system fonts during installation which stay on the system even if the software is uninstalled afterwards. The cleartype fonts Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel are installed into the fonts directory of the Windows XP installation.

You can change the font that Windows is using in the Appearance tab of the Display Properties. Just click on the Advanced button in that menu and select the element that you want to change the font for. You should see an immediate difference if you select one of the new fonts and have cleartype enabled.

Users who use a custom design have to take care that the new font does not break the design. It could take some time until you get it right.

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Fonts500 is a website that claims to have 500 of the best fonts available. The good part about this is that all of these are free for your use. An initial visit to the page displays the first 100 fonts, with links to the other 400 at the bottom of the page.

The fonts are displayed such that each font’s name is written in that font itself. If you want, you can use custom text to view how the same text looks in different fonts. The fonts themselves are varied and interesting. Some of them actually tempted me to download and add to my font collection.

Each font can be downloaded in a zip file. Then, you can extract it to the Fonts directory in your Control Panel. If you want all the fonts, I suggest you use the Downthemall Firefox extension. All 500 fonts together come to only 26 Mb.

It is important to remember that too many fonts can slow your computer down. However, it’s still worth checking out all the different fonts available.

Are you satisfied with the standard Windows fonts or are you always on the lookout for unique fonts to add to your collection? Where do you go when you want good fonts? Do you know of any other sites offering free fonts?

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It therefore would be good to pick those fonts that you want (need) and those which you do not which would have the effect that you would still have all the fonts you work with normally and experience a faster system at the same time. Also, if you’re into fonts and use many variations of them for your work / hobby purposes, you may appreciate a great source of free fonts I’d like to mention underneath.

Font Frenzy is a great tool for font management available as a free download. This application consists of 4 parts allowing you to put your fonts in order. DeFrenzy backs up all additional fonts to a specified directory and erases them from the font folder so that it in fact restores the default state after Windows installation.

FrenzySnap cooperates with DeFrenzy by first allowing you to make a snapshot of currently used fonts and return to that state using DeFrenzy later on. ReFrenzy provides you a simple way to restore previously saved fonts from your back-ups. Last but not least, FrenzyMan allows you to manage each single font individually meaning that you can check one or more of them and then execute certain actions like Adding/Erasing, Loading/Unloading and so on. The last advantage of this lovely tool is that you can simply change the text working as a preview for installed fonts along with its size.

Besides managing or deleting fonts from your system, you might also want to choose some beautiful ones and add them into your system using the previously described utility. Fawnt.com offers hundreds of high quality fonts for free. It lets you preview the fonts, rate them, use custom preview text, check the package content details and download it free of charge. You can find some pretty bizarre pieces here.

You need to take a look at the link “10000 more fonts” at the bottom of the page after you are finished looking at the picks on the main page. This link is well worth it.

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A quick recap: Fonts slow down system startup. The difference between 1000 and 100 installed fonts is almost 25 seconds which is huge. Windows XP installs 44 fonts and all other fonts are added by other applications such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and Gimp.

Besides offering the ability to remove all non system fonts in Windows XP which is called DeFrenzy in Font Frenzy it offers the functionality to make a snapshot of your current fonts and backup them.

The so called FrenzyMan is a font manager which displays all fonts in a list giving the user options to install, delete, add new, unload and view the selected fonts. What I really like about Font Frenzy is that it does not need to be installed and can be run from any location on your hard drive.

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