Font shopping?

Have you been out font-shopping recently? I must admit I haven't been. Its not the fear of the overcrowded shelves or the shopfloor, or even the delay at the checkouts. Its time- slips out of our hands like fine white sands.

But grab a moment and have a look at Font Shop (www.fontshop.com) - a great resource, and almost after a year or maybe more, the site looks fresh, relevant and unobtrusive.

The new fonts (typefaces if you will, please) and the most popular fonts are great for the designer on the road - a quick check on where fonts are headed for in a post-Brody, post-modern era. The best feature, though, has to be the type navigator. I recall asking my friends - trying to draw or detail typefaces, trying to tell, describe or show them the source if its online. And we have struggled to put a name to the face or a face to the name. The type navigator does it all - is an intuitive way and promises a few happy accidents on the way.

Choose by form, font or designer - though it has to be the form search option that is appealing to the typographer in us all. The form gives a number of choices - in terms of weight, width, serifs or sans, angle, axis - and voila - at the end of it comes a list of your fonts. Some completely off from what you imagined it to be - but worth a go. I suppose its far more exciting out seeing and shopping for fonts rather than read my essays, jump to > http://typenav.fontshop.com/