5 Online Tools for Design – Fonts and Text

by Keri | Jan 5, 2018

There are so many tools out there to help designers streamline their work. It goes so far beyond the typical Adobe Suite that people imagine when they think graphic design. But before eyes glaze over for the non-designers, the tools I list below are not exclusively useful to designers. I recommend them for anyone who uses fonts or text documents.

In no particular order, here is my small collection of the online tools which help me with my work instead of eating into my creative process. I focused on the ones I use for typography and text this time and may do further lists with other categories.

But for the record I do tend to default to my favorite fonts (Gotham & Archer).

1. wordmark.it

This is a tool that I don’t see talked about very often but which I use SO much. The idea is you type in a bit of text and the web application previews that text with every font you have on your computer. It also gives you the option to preview Google Fonts if you need type for the web. The sort functions make it simple to mark options you like and come back to them as a group to compare and choose. Before using this site I had to copy text boxes and click through individual fonts before choosing. It. Was. A. Nightmare.

wordmark.it

2. sortmylist.com

I have a feeling that screenshot is going to raise some eyebrows. Yes, this web app uses comic-sans in its interface. It is still super useful.

This is a deceptively simple tool. It quickly sorts list, removes blank lines, replaces separators and even removes duplicates. Some of those things can be done in a spreadsheet but this web app means I don’t have to do anything complicated.

The last thing I used this for was sorting lines of dialogue from Buffy the Vampire Slayer for input to the predictive keyboard from Botnik Studios.

sortmylist.com

3. WhatTheFont

3 and 4 are used for a similar purpose, trying to figure out what font something is when you don’t have access to the original file or the source code. With WhatTheFont this is done with a photo or screenshot of the thing in question. It looks for individual letterforms and tries to compare them to known fonts. Pretty useful.

WhatTheFont

4. identifont.com

With Identifont you are asked a series of questions about the font you want to identify. It asks things like what year is it from, what characters are available to you, and then a long series of visual identifiers. Of the two I think this one is more accurate and gives better options for similar fonts.

identifont.com

5. Google Drive

Google drive is such a default in my life that I forget that other people may not use it as much as I do. I never installed word on my macbook during college and just bounced back and forth between Google Docs and InDesign. Now I use Google Photos for storage, Sheets for the data I want organize (You know like my detailed Netflix ratings and comparative charts of on-demand printers, their prices, and artist margins. Normal things.), and Forms for the questions I feel the need to ask the world.

Google Drive

What are some of the tools you use to make your job/hobbies/life easier?

1 Comment

Marisa on January 6, 2018 at 11:51 pm

I need to look at all these on my laptop (not my phone) they all look like a ton of fun…marisa
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