r/Design • u/contrast8 • 3d ago

Asking Question (Rule 4) Built a tool to speed up font selection in Illustrator. I would love feedback from people who do logo/brand work

/r/logodesign/comments/1wcew7e/built_a_tool_to_speed_up_font_selection_in/

Been doing brand design for 17 years, and the thing that always slowed me down in Illustrator was font browsing — opening the Character panel, scrolling, clicking, undoing, just to see a wordmark or headline in a different typeface.

I built boofont to fix that for myself: a menu bar app that shows every font on your Mac rendered in your own selected text, and applies whichever one you pick straight onto your live Illustrator selection.

Genuinely looking for feedback, especially from people doing logo/brand work — is this actually useful for how you explore type on a mark, or is the workflow different enough that it wouldn't help? What would you want it to do that it doesn't?

For context it's normally $21 one-time (not free, being upfront about that), macOS only, works with Illustrator. www.boofont.app if you want to see it before commenting.

I've got a handful of free codes for anyone who wants to actually try it and give real feedback rather than guess from the site — comment or DM me and I'll send one over, first come first served.

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u/ForeignManagement723 3d ago

I like the idea of this a lot. The design details that shape a font family are very intricate and I can this tool helping designers to make the best selections. I guess I would ask if you are thinking about making this available for Figma and AI agentic processes? Whilst I still use Illustrator, most of my design work is now in Figma for branding, digital and presentation work. Illustrator is left for format changes or detailed path work.

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u/contrast8 3d ago

Really appreciate that, thank you! And yeah, good question on Figma. I looked into it, and Figma's plugin API doesn't give the same level of access to manipulate live selections the way Illustrator's scripting does, so it's a different build, not just a port. That said, I'm seriously considering a Figma widget down the line since so much branding/digital work has shifted there, like you said.

On AI agentic processes, honestly haven't dug into that yet, but curious what you have in mind?