That happened this morning when I was thinking about organising fonts (I know – my lifestyle is sooo rock and roll).  I use fonts a lot – more so in recent years as I’ve develop a deeper appreciation of good typographical design.  So I’m always toying with new fonts, and working with lots of variations for different projects.

The built-in OS X Font Book is a very lame beast which doesn’t really do much for me – not enough intuitive font management in there.  At the other end of the scale Suitcase never really got me hooked because it just felt too over-powering and feature-driven – font management should be really simple, particularly since these programs are fiddling with system-level stuff (I remember a case a few years ago where a colleague accidentally deactivated one of his system fonts using Suitcase, which rendered his notebook useless since OS X wouldn’t boot – luckily that can’t happen in more recent versions of the OS).

For the past six months or so, I’ve been using FontExplorer X.  Although it’s not perfect, it has proven to be the best fit for me, with a good balance between simplicity and functionality.  But it’s still painful to use when you want to browse and select a set of fonts to experiment with for a particular project – the endless list of font families doesn’t tell me anything about the visual appearance of the fonts themselves – I have to sift through and endlessly click around to find something suitable.

What I want is an application which does three things.  Firstly, it should allow me to easily install and uninstall fonts – that’s a given.  Secondly, activation and deactivation should be a cinch – something FontExplorer does very well.  And thirdly, I want to be able to browse my fonts the way I want – I want to see the fonts themselves, not just a dry and meaningless list of font names.  Is that too much to ask?

Well, apparently not, because sitting in my RSS feed this morning came news of Fontcase, which is currently in beta.  And it looks like just the application I was imagining!  The UI design looks gorgeous – simple but functional – and the visual representation of each font is an absolute godsend.

I can’t wait to see the final, finished product.  And if it lives up to my (very demanding) expectations, then I’ll be eagerly adding this to my arsenal of design tools.

As a sidenote, the homepage for this app is a brilliant example of clean and intelligent design.  There’s no need for superfluous words to sell it – a picture of the interface tells you all you need to know.