I’ve come a cropper many times with fonts I installed for a specific purpose, be it for a web page design, type-setting a pdf or ebook, or for graphic deign work. In the heat of the moment, I tend to pay little attention to the name of the font, especially since my brain is in “visual” mode.

After some time, I may come back to whatever I was working on and think – “what was that font called again?” or I may be working on something else and think “what was that font I used on such-and-such project?”.

At this point the thought of endless trawling through the installed fonts on my system, digging around in folders or looking at old project files is a serious block to creative flow!

Hence, some kind of procedure is needed so I know where to go to reference fonts quickly and easily.

Keep fonts in organized folders

Sounds fairly obvious but keep your fonts in one place and organize them however you choose, whatever works best. I tend to keep fonts in folders according to the project they were used on, but sometimes also have more general folders like “handwriting” or “decorations”.

Rename font files

This isn’t as simple as it sounds!

Yes, you can rename your ttf or otf font files in windows like any other files. The only problem is that doing this will not rename the font itself as it appears in whatever program you are using, be it OpenOffice or Adobe Illustrator.

What you need to do is rename the font internally then re-make the font file.

In order to this, you should get hold of the free and incredibly useful program fontforge.

If you’re interested in customizing fonts this is the program for you as it’s incredibly functional and does just about everything to do with making or modifying fonts.

However, in this case, all we want to do is change the name of the font so that you have a choice as to how it displays within programs.

Here is the step-by-step process:

1. Open the font in Fontforge
2. Navigate to Elements > Font info
3. Change all three name values to the name you choose
4. Click OK. You will get a warning about UniqueID, choose “change”
5. Ignore any further warning thrown up by Fontforge, although these may be if interest, the font will still work.
6. Go to File > Generate Fonts
7. Choose where you want to save the font, then click “Generate”
8. Finally, install the font by right clicking the font file in windows explorer and choosing “install”.

Because you now have free choice as to what your fonts are called, you can use a prefix to sort them by category in whatever way works best for you.

For example if you have a lot of “script” type fonts, you could name them with the prefix “SCRIPT_”. Now, when you open your font drop-down in whatever program you are using, e.g. Word, Photoshop, etc, all your “SCRIPT_” fonts will be displayed together.