Sigh.

You used to be able to get a specimen for any typeface you liked, and save it with all the others for reference....

... and then categorize them e.g. as John Hudson has suggested here: http://www.typophile.com/node/9757

I keep my fonts organized on my hard drive in the same way that I keep them in my font management application.

@ crossgrove, what do you mean?

@ tina, Thanks for the link!

@ Miss Tiffany, What program do you use for font management? I’m on a PC :( Do you have a collection of font images also or are these just your font files?

jesse: for typefaces i’d like to acquire licences to, i have a little wishlist bouncing around in my head. if i want to get a closer look at a face, i usually see if there’s a PDF available to get a closer look.
I do the same as tiffany by sorting typefaces by foundry.

On a PC you’re lucky, because Adobe Type Manager (ATM) still works fine:
http://www.adobe.com/products/atm/index.html
or, as an alternative, you might consider “typograf”:
http://neuber.com/typograph/

Without a specimen, a typeface is essentially an idea. Type for print performs differently in different environments, and it’s nearly impossible to know how well it performs, without printed examples. In our digital world, nobody wants to spend money on printed specimens. So to choose a font for a book or magazine, you have to view them onscreen at a large size, and then somehow infer how the fonts will look when printed much smaller on paper. That’s an unreasonable leap to ask people to make, when they’re going to spend money and commit their project to a certain typeface.

Some foundries offer PDF specimens, you could collect them and print them out, put them in a binder. But that’s limited by your own output quality.

With printed type specimens, you can “collect” your favorites without having to buy them, as you’ve described. Look, enjoy, and become familiar with the typeface and what it can do, so that when a good use for it comes along, you can be confident in buying it.

I am on a Mac. Out of Font Explorer I can easily create an image of any font simply by dragging and dropping.

Adobe Type manager lets you add and remove fonts and view previews of them right? But i don’t think you can organize your fonts, it just alphabatizes them. And you can’t preview the fonts with text that you want. Bah when is font explorer going to be for pc’s?

ahh thanks crossgrove. So why can’t you get specimens like that anymore? What all fonts should I have printed out in a book? Any advice on say everyones top ten that they have printed out to view on paper?

Here is an example of the folder I’ve started. Mainly when I’m looking for a logoFont or come across some nice type that i like in a picture I just save it in this folder to look at later. So this is more what I was talking about as far as font libraries:

Jesse,

Your original post mentions “collecting typefaces” which sounds like buying type to add to your own type library. I realized you meant collecting *samples of typefaces*, not the fonts themselves, but it wasn’t clear from your first post. Of course, the one can lead to the other, and we encourage that. ; )

I think Tiff’s method of filing by foundry or designer is useful; use it for the inspiration samples, and then later when you’re building your type library, use it again for the actual fonts. You could make up your own classifications; text and display, techno, script, etc. etc. There’s very little agreement about how to classify type, and fortunately, you are free to use whatever method suits you on your own machine.

It’s a great thing to do; collect samples, specimens, screenshots, for later reference. I have a folder on my hard drive where I put all my downloaded PDF specimens, which I rename with foundry and typeface name, if that isn’t already obvious. I print specimens for text faces only, on the laser printer at work (which in my case is a nice 1200 dpi machine). Those I keep together near the other, rarer specimens from the foundries. Display faces are easier to understand and assess onscreen, so I leave those in digital form only.

I don’t know why there aren’t printed specimens available anymore. I consider them essential to demonstrating a good typeface. I’m sure most would cite the cost of producing them. SInce there are so many micro-foundries, and the economy of developing a typeface is so different now, very few can justify the marketing expense. Even Adobe, whose Adobe Originals program continues at present, stopped printing their amazing specimen books in the 90’s. It’s a shame, because type made for print needs to be shown in print, and without a specimen, graphic and book designers are left guessing whether something will work for them. I suspect that most designers will not do hours of research or spend resources making their own specimens (without the typefaces, how could you?), they will simply revert to using the old, tried-and-true faces they’ve been using since 1989; Times, Adobe Garamond, Univers, etc.

Small foundries especially have very little budget for marketing, and most likely, they have no experience in marketing either. What to spend money on? Where are designers looking for new type? It’s a puzzle. Larger foundries have abandoned most print media for marketing type, so it’s all becoming sadly virtual. I’m sure the increase in onscreen reading, fed by the internet and digital content (news, blogs, e-mail), and the fonts made for screen reading (MS ClearType) are factors as well.

Jesse, in ATM you can right-click the font names and find out more information or change the words you want to see. I’m working with the deluxe version for a long time now, but as far as I remember this option was given in the light version, too — the difference was, that with the deluxe-Version it’s possible to assign your fonts to folders.
With “typograf” there are even more options, e.g. comparing fonts directly or get more elaborated infos.

@crossgrove: Ahh yes samples of type thank you. Any chance I can download or you can upload a samppling (I can setup FTP on my server ;) of your collected type samples, specimens, screenshots, etc? Looking to expand my knowledge on good typefaces.

@tina: I’ll have to take a look the Adobe manager again. I don’t think I have the pro version. The typograf thing looks cool, did you just download it or are you a member also?

@crossgrove
“I don’t know why there aren’t printed specimens available anymore”

There are a few. I have a few printed specimens from Underware (two books I bought: Dolly and Read naked (Sauna), but then I can walk to them within 5 min from my place of education. I know that there is another dutch foundry that has printed versions, but I have forgot there name.

@j_polo9
I collect printed pdf’s, put them in a binder and on my computer. I also collect and make pictures of typefaces I see around me, but I still need to organize them.

There ARE printed specimens available.
House insustries do very good ones, as does Font Bureau.
The Indie Fonts series contains samples from many, er, indie foundries.
There are book compilations from various publishers.
Many foundries also provide PDFs, which can be printed out.

t26.com has several printed specimens/catalogs too! They are all bundled in one box. They only ask that you pay for the shipping.

Oh i just got an idea from canus... What if we made a thread showcasing type collected from pictures/ scans/ online/ etc. then we have someone organize them and make them into a book that typophile can sell and use to run/ improve the forum?

> I know that there is another dutch foundry that has printed versions, but I have forgot there name.

You might’ve been thinking of the Enschedé Font Foundry. I requested a printed sample from them and recieved them within a week (from Netherlands to Australia!) and they were very impressive and they had also included real newspaper and magazine samples to display their typefaces hard at work.

As a bonus, on the envelope my name and mail to address was beautifully hand written by Peter Matthias Noordzij himself.

I’m in strong agreement with Carl Crossgrove, you can’t really judge text faces online or on screen. You HAVE to see them in print before ordering them, for this reason alone I’m a fanatical about PDF specimens and luckily enough I have an adequate (1200dpi) laser printer to print then out on.

* I have a dedicated folder for type speciemens. :^)

Well why don’t we pool our resources and have all these pdf’s avalable somewhere for download? How about a wiki dedicated to font download pdf’s?

We could probably get most of the foundaries to agree to let us host type pdf’s for them right? Or have links on the wiki to go exactly to the downloads for pdf’s at the different foundaries. Or emails/ links to places like Enschedé Font Foundry to request samples.

There are some available at the DTL website as well.
And in case you don’t have an adequate 1200 dpi laser printer,
I’d like to add a book which contains lots of (dutch) examples:
Jan Middendorp’s Dutch Type.
Another option to get printed examples is at conferences.

Oh I forgot to mention the latest type sampler from Underware! It’s a collaboration with Is Not Magazine. I didn’t know about them before finding out about this, but apparently their poster-size magazine uses Underware fonts only.

From their website: “Is Not take-away #1 is the first portable issue of Is Not Magazine. It is also the new, comprehensive type sampler from Underware, showing their fonts both in use and indexed.”

You can preview Is Not take-away No 1 online.