Organising Fonts and the need for something new.

If ever there was a need for information management, then my fonts are it, closely followed by my pictures. The advantage I have when looking for a picture is that Windows supports thumbnail images of at least some file types that allow me to get an overview of sorts.

Fonts however can only be seen by either opening them or previewing them through software for managing fonts, and even then it tends to be slow. The other difficulty is that fonts have far more subtle changes than photgraphs, since unless they are a dingbat they need to represent a recognisable letter of the alphabet. So the only real way I have of organising my fonts is within the Windows folder structure, which isn't great since quite often fonts will fit into several descriptive catagories, but you don't want to keep multiple copies of fonts. Also at a granular level fonts need to be kept in families, which in themselves will likely stretch across different catagories as the different weights and italics change the feel of the font.

There is no standard for organising fonts either, so every designer has their own way of sorting out their fonts. The power to add my own meta data to fonts, to tag them, would be amazing, as then I could desribe a font as well askeep it within it's family.

Flickr's framework is not appropriate, because it is not as easy to create fonts as it is photos and sharing fonts is breaching copyright, but I do think it could be used on a local basis and add masses of value.