{"id":1012,"date":"2014-08-22T22:40:36","date_gmt":"2014-08-23T03:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2014\/08\/22\/140822-wordmarkit\/"},"modified":"2022-03-28T15:08:24","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T20:08:24","slug":"140822-wordmarkit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2014\/08\/22\/140822-wordmarkit\/","title":{"rendered":"Lose your place in a maze of fonts? Wordmark.it"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><p>Me : fonts = Prepper : ammo<\/p>\n<p>&#8212; Eric Siegmund (@ESieg) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ESieg\/statuses\/502995754324336640\">August 23, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async=\"\" src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>I have 23 folders named &#8220;fonts&#8221; on my desktop Mac. My default font library contains 500 font families. [Side note: Most of them are unfamiliar to me; I think they appeared when I upgraded my OS to Mavericks earlier this summer. I think I would have remembered intentionally acquiring Yu Mincho Demibold, or Wawati or Sinhala Sangam.] In short, I have too many fonts, although that&#8217;s still not enough.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, because of the impossibility &#8211; for me, anyway &#8211; of keeping track of what I have installed on my machine, I tend to reuse the same small subset. If only there was a way to see at a glance what fonts I have at my disposal&#8230;and what they look like.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m in luck, because thanks to a website called <a href=\"https:\/\/wordmark.it\/\">wordmark.it<\/a>, I can do just that. It uses some clever scripting to identify and then display all installed fonts, using the text of your choosing so you can compare the alternatives. Here&#8217;s a screen shot of a portion of the results:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc;\" src=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/misc\/wordmarkit.jpg\" alt=\"Screen capture of wordmark.it\"><\/p>\n<p>This brings to your desktop, for your fonts, a similar capability that vendors like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.myfonts.com\/\">MyFonts.com<\/a> have used for years to allow you to compare typefaces. Of course, on those sites you&#8217;re limited to what the service is selling.<\/p>\n<p>The fonts appear in alphabetical order and you can resize the samples and reverse the display to white-on-black. You can also adjust tracking (but not kerning), and zoom via magnifying glass if you want to get really up close and personal with the details of the typeface.<\/p>\n<p>I have to admit that while this is a quite useful tool, it&#8217;s also a little creepy in that it&#8217;s reading data on your computer and if it can do that with fonts then what else might it be snooping on, but I&#8217;m being paranoid, aren&#8217;t I? I don&#8217;t pretend to understand the workings of the Flash script that makes this possible, and I had actually forgotten that ActionScript (as Adobe calls this scripting language) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.adobe.com\/devnet\/logged_in\/abansod_iphone.html\">now works with iOS devices<\/a>, so this website will work with iPhones and iPads.The site&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/wordmark.it\/privacy.html\">privacy statement<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/wordmark.it\/tos.html\">terms of service<\/a> are essentially boilerplate and don&#8217;t address the details of how your data is being accessed or what safeguards are in place around that access. So, let your tolerance for risk be your guide.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Regardless of those potential concerns, I&#8217;m adding this website to my list of helpful design tools, and now that I know what Wawati looks like, I may start using it in all my personal correspondence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Me : fonts = Prepper : ammo &#8212; Eric Siegmund (@ESieg) August 23, 2014 I have 23 folders named &#8220;fonts&#8221; on my desktop Mac. My default font library contains 500 font families. [Side note: Most of them are unfamiliar to me; I think they appeared when I upgraded my OS to Mavericks earlier this summer.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2014\/08\/22\/140822-wordmarkit\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Lose your place in a maze of fonts? Wordmark.it<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9213,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012\/revisions\/9213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}