How many fonts are in your collection?

By Jim Kidwell
Product Marketing Manager at Extensis

With anything that you create, it’s important to understand the needs of who will eventually use what you create.

Create phones for the elderly? Understanding the visual and auditory needs of this consumer base would be critical to building a successful product.

So, when we at Extensis create software for creative professionals, we pay close attention to what our users need. To this end, we collect data – lots and lots of data. I’d like to share a couple of statistics that I found interesting.

Think that you have a massive font collection? Well, don’t be so certain of that fact. While the average number of fonts managed in Suitcase Fusion is around 4,000, one particular user has over 80,000 fonts! Now that’s quite a collection!

It’s likely that your collection is more modest. The chart below displays our survey results of relative sizes of font collections.

Of course you won’t likely have all of those fonts active at the same time. The average number of active fonts that Suitcase Fusion users have active is around 650. This would definitely make your font menus more manageable, while still giving you some creative diversity.

The second bit of info that I found interesting was the types of fonts in our users’ collections. Fonts technologies have grown and changed over the years, and our users’ collections reflect that as well. The vast majority of you have many types. Pretty much everyone has True Type, PostScript, OpenType TT and OpenType PS fonts, but the less common font types, such as PostScript Multiple Master and True Type Collections are the main differentiator.

With this type of data, we’re able to make informed decisions about product development – from how we build the user interface, to how we approach the underlying technology of our products. As you likely strive to get better in your job, we’re constantly striving to build better, more useful software.