Choosing fonts like a raccoon chooses shiny things
A confession about my fonts folder, and the three-question test that finally stopped the hoarding.
At the time of the intervention, my fonts folder contained 212 typefaces. I could name the designer of maybe thirty. I had actively used perhaps nine. The other two hundred were acquisitions — grabbed from foundry sales and "free font Friday" posts with the pure, uncomplicated joy of a raccoon finding a bottle cap. Shiny. Mine now. Into the pile.
The problem with the pile is not disk space. It's that every new project began with an hour of shopping my own folder — auditioning typefaces like a casting director, which feels like design work and is actually procrastination wearing design's clothes. The page didn't need a new typeface. I needed the feeling of choosing one.
The three-question test
The fix was a test. Any font that wants onto a page answers three questions, and most can't get past the first:
- Does it have a job? Not "does it look good" — everything in a 212-font folder looks good, that's how it got there. A job: headlines, body, or data. If I can't name the job, there is no vacancy.
- Can it actually do the job? Does it have the weights, the italics, the characters, the numbers the job needs? A display face with one weight applying for the body-text job is politely declined — hierarchy in body text runs on weights it doesn't have.
- Would the page notice if it were swapped? The brutal one. If a reasonable system-font substitute changes nothing about how the page works, the font is decoration, and decoration auditions last.
Three jobs is all a page has
The deeper discovery was that question one has only three honest answers. A page has a voice (display: headlines and big numbers), a body (long-form reading), and data (labels, timestamps, tables, code). That's the whole org chart. This blog runs on exactly that trio: a handwritten-feeling display face with precisely one weight — so hierarchy comes from size, never boldness — a sturdy humanist sans for paragraphs, and a monospace doing every scrap of metadata in uppercase.
The mono is the underrated hire. Setting every small label in monospace, slightly letterspaced, is the cheapest sophistication in typography — it makes a page read as instrumented, like someone measured things before shipping. (The full tour of this site's system is in the hard shadows post.)
A typeface without a job is a bottle cap. The raccoon in you will defend it to the death; the designer in you knows it's trash with sparkle.
The aftermath
The folder now holds eleven families: the working trio, plus a bench of understudies that have each survived the test at least once. New acquisitions are allowed — I'm reformed, not cured — but they go into a quarantine folder, and twice a year anything that never got a job is released back into the wild.
Project start-up time went from an hour of auditions to five minutes of confirmation. It turns out that when fonts have jobs, the choosing is already done; you're just checking the staffing. The raccoon is not happy about this. The raccoon doesn't ship pages.