Choosing a font

Font Picker screen shot

When I do a piece of design that involves typography I spend ages choosing the right font. The font that will endow the work with the right feeling and the font that is most similar to the one I've got pictured in my head.

This normally takes ages, but I've written a Font Picker program in Flash to help me do it. It shows you a sample of your chosen text displayed using all the fonts on your computer. You can then whittle down this list by removing unsuitable fonts.

The best thing is that this works straight from your browser and still displays the fonts that are on your computer. I've also made a version you can download and install if you have a PC or a Mac.

Picking the right font still takes ages, but hopefully you'll find this tool helpful in visualizing the typefaces you're considering.

You can use this fantastic tool here

But how does it work?

In Flash ActionScript 3.0 there is a very useful function called Font.enumerateFonts.

This allowed me to get a list of all the fonts on the computer running the flash program and display any text I wanted using them.

I've also used Adobe AIR to make a desktop version of this program. I've got some planned extra features for that version, including tagging for fonts and possibly some export features. The great thing about Adobe AIR is that it really was very easy indeed to take my web based Flash App and make it an AIR application.

David J said

Love it Rich, I'm just about to send it around work :)