Font Management for Creatives and Agencies
Working in the advertising industry for over twenty years, you develop a deep understanding of the trials and tribulations creatives and agencies face when it comes to font management. First and foremost, when working with fonts, you don’t want to be managing fonts by dropping every font library into your system fonts folder. If you’ve done this in the past and your operating system has gone awry, you get it and that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
Jumping back twenty years ago, there were basically two major font management software applications available to help creatives and agencies manage fonts … Font Reserve by DiamondSoft and Suitcase by Extensis. Both had their pros and cons, and I will say I generally favored Font Reserve over Suitcase.
In 2003, Extensis acquired DiamondSoft and shortly thereafter introduced Extensis Suitcase Fusion, aptly named to reflect a “fusion” of DiamondSoft’s Font Reserve and Extensis’ Suitcase. Suitcase Fusion brought together some of the best features and functionality of Font Reserve and Suitcase. Although not perfect by any means, it was still the best tool available for the job!
Over the past 15+ years, Extensis has continued to broaden the feature set and capabilities of Suitcase Fusion with major improvements to collaboration and centralization of font management which not only benefit mid-to-large businesses but also small businesses.
In the early days, if you wanted to centralize font management so the entire team was working off a central, uniform font library, you needed to invest in a font server and the corresponding licensing … a tall order for small businesses with limited resources. However, with the introduction of Extensis TeamSync coupled with Suitcase Fusion, Extensis tapped into the cloud to make it easier and more affordable for businesses to centralize font management and improve collaboration amongst teams without the costs of in-house hardware, maintenance and extensive IT resources, something many small businesses simply can’t afford.
If you’ve managed in-house servers, you understand the costs associated with managing and maintaining the hardware, software, and licensing not to mention backup, redundancy and disaster recovery.
Today, known as Connect Fonts Powered By Suitcase, Connect Fonts continues to build on Extensis Suitcase Fusion and Extensis TeamSync and remains a great font management tool for creatives and agencies.