Fonts
I've been meaning to talk about this forever, and now that I have a forum, I think I will. :-)

Long story short: I think we have too many fonts. A lot could be scrapped altogether--most people (myself included) can't tell the difference between Times, Adobe Caslon, Adobe Garamond, Bodoni, Palatino, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all fonts are unique and beautiful, and students should be aware of their existence--maybe we could even spend some time talking about a bunch of similar fonts like the ones I mentioned, or maybe a little time on Helvetica vs. Arial--but finding a good font by paging through the 3841-page list is painful. (Plus, Preview will crash if you scroll through that PDF at full speed for a minute or two.) I think 500 would be plenty. You can cover a pretty wide range with that. With fewer fonts, we could leave them all open, all the time, which would make working easier--you wouldn't have to deal with font activation. (On the other hand, it's good to teach font activation... but then again, forcing its use in all classes, all the time, might not be the best way to go.)

Also, I think they should be grouped in a more usable way. A-Z is a handy way to keep them straight if you know the name of what you want, but it doesn't tell people who are new to the collection anything. I'd suggest breaking them into different groups: classic serif, classic san-serif, fun, classy, techno, etc.

I don't mean to put down the effort involved in creating this. I just think, now that we've spent some time using it as it is, it would be better for our purposes here if it were different, and I'll be happy to be involved in changing it. Also, one thing that definitely needs to be changed: a lot of the fonts that are in the book are not actually in the system. In one of my last months in DP, a student was looking through there for fonts, and of the 10 or so he picked, we couldn't find at least 5. Or maybe they were there, but unfindable for some reason. That's entirely possible, given that there are 4,879 items in the 'Fonts' folder on the server.

Thoughts? Leave a comment!