Purple Frog: tutorial

Are you a designer or someone who often works with fonts? Let me recommend you this font manager.
I don't know why it took me 8 years of working with graphic design to finally think: hey, I wonder if there’s an easier way of doing this. So I went digging and it has made my font related work so much faster and simpler! I have even been varying more on my choice of fonts just because I can really see what they look like, which you cannot do properly on most programs (the font samplers are too small). There are other font managers out there, some are free and some paid for, but Nexus has everything I need so for me it works great. Here is a preview from my computer.

It has options for installing/uninstalling fonts, and apparently you don’t even need to have all those fonts installed in your computer. The site says: “while nexusfont is running, all listed fonts in NexusFont are available on other programs. Don't slow down your system by keeping hundreds of fonts installed to it”. But I don’t really use those features, what I found really useful is the tagging system. I’m a big fan of tags, since they let you organize your stuff with more than one category (as opposed to sets or files where the category is the name of the set). So for example I can have a single font tagged as “decorative,hand,slim,script” instead of just having it inside a set called “decorative” or “hand”.
Granted, it took me a whole week to organize all my fonts into the categories I created, but it was worth it! I even created a little “method” which I’m going to describe here, since someone out there might find it useful (hopefully…).

First I made 2 sets of fonts – “text” and “not text” (just a silly name to describe all the more decorative, not suitable for long reading fonts. I use these most in my work).
Then I went on to writing down all the categories I wanted to classify my “not text” fonts into. They are: angled, blackletter, bold, boxy, brushed, calligraphic, comic, cute, decorative, dingbat, distressed, fun, geometric, hand, languages, almost text, rounded, script and slim. I copied all this tags and pasted them to all my “not text” fonts, so when I organized them I was removing tags rather than adding them (I did this also because there was no way to quickly add tags just by clicking on them, you have to type them manually. Maybe something for the developers to add to a next version). I also added a tag called “uncategorized” to all the fonts, so I could stop at any time and continue the next day by turning on the filter for the “uncategorized” tag – so the program only showed those.
Next began the long process of looking at each font and deciding which tags it belonged to (or not). This was a little boring but well, it was done once and the time I save on choosing fonts now has paid off. I just have to remember to tag the new fonts when I get them. Here’s a look at what it looks like when I turn on the filter for “distressed”.

Another nice feature is the copyright and url info that appears when you select a font (bottom left corner). This makes it super easy to check if a font has commercial use allowed.
One thing worries me though, when I tried to import the Nexus settings from my pc into the laptop I didn´t manage… it says in the readme file: “NexusFont can be run in USB memory with font files in it. Even if the drive letter is changed, all library information will be maintained”. Maybe I just need to get the hang of it. Will add it here if I figure it out.
I should also say that I was not asked or endorsed to review this program, I just enjoyed it and wanted to share.
Thanks for reading, see you next time!

There's still time to spice up your Easter gifts or decoration. Here's a little tutorial i made on how to transform an egg carton using a pretty napkin.

Here's what you're gonna need:

- egg carton(s)
- decorative napkin
- glue
- i used a foam brush, but a regular brush will work as well.

Step 1

Remove the labels of the carton. See that little blue spot i missed? It showed a bit through my napkin, so you might want to avoid that.

Step 2

Cut your napkin so that there is enough paper to cover the whole lid of the carton and your motive is centered. Lay the napkin on the lid first to decide what will look good where.

Step 3

You can't see in the picture, but there is white glue diluted on water on the little plate. Spread this over the whole lid. The carton is very absorbent, so you might have to reapply as you continue to glue to napkin to it.

Step 4

Carefully lay the napkin on the lid and start to apply the glue on top of the napkin. It should be pretty soaked and it will get fragile, but if you accidentally rip it, just continue to glue it in the same way. It shouldn't be very visible once it's dry.

Step 5

For the "weirder" shapes of the box, you will just need a bit of patience and to keep applying the water+glue mixture. The napkin will bend and take the shape of the carton. You could also choose to apply the napkin only on the flat part of the lid, as i did on the bigger carton (more pictures ahead)

Step 6

For the holes, just poke the napkin and work it with glue towards the inside of the lid, like so:

Step 7

Carefully rip out the excess napkin and glue the ends to the carton. On this box you can see i applied the napkin only on the flat part of the carton, so i ripped that edge too on this step.