Last week, Extensis quietly released an update to their excellent Font Management Best Practices Guide. This is the 5th edition of their font management white paper, and it remains an excellent resource for designers who struggle with how to best manage their huge font libraries.

Managing Fonts in Mac OS X – 5th Edition (January 2009)

Simplifying the complex topic of font management in Mac OS X isn’t an easy job. Extensis does a good job describing the underlying challenges designers face when managing fonts on Mac OS X today. Their solutions are expectedly biased towards their own software (Suitcase Fusion 2, or the new Universal Type Server) but not unfairly so.
The fundamentals steps described in this guide are very much in line with my own approach. Although when I train designers to organize and manage their fonts, I tend to combine their Steps 1 & 3 into a single process.

Step 1: Organize Your Font Files
Step 2: Manage Your System Fonts
Step 3: Use a Font Manager
Step 4: Cleanup your Font Library

Source: This tip inspired by prep work for this Wednesday’s workshop/webinar on Font Management in Mac OS X for Designers. I’ve taught this workshop every year for the past 5 years. This will be the first time we are making it available outside of the Seattle area with our new hybrid workshop/webinar format.

Font Tips on Twitter: I’ve collected more font-related tips than I could fit into a single week’s post. So for the rest of the week, I’m tweeting new font tips every day. Follow Creativetechs on Twitter. (You might also ask What’s Twitter?)