First, yes, for those of you out there wondering, I am still, indeed, alive. I haven’t forgotten about this place, although, it has been neglected somewhat. I intend to remedy that though and have been working on some new layouts, etc.

The blog has also been neglected–not that I’m the world’s most frequent blogger by any stretch of the imagination. In my true and usual fashion, I’m going to write about something of no practical importance or fascination–my out-of-control font, photoshop brush, and photoshop goodies/tutorials collections. We’ll start with the fonts.

I am a font junkie going on 12 years now. It started when we bought our first family computer back in 1994 and has continued to this day. My current font collection has been carefully cultivated and cared for over those 12 years as I’ve given in time and time again to the insatiable urge to install or download one more pretty, shiny, and possibly useful font. I’m one of those people who if I get a new program, I must install and check out every single font that comes with it. I scour free font sites on the Internet, always in search of the perfect font. As one might expect, my font collection can grow completely out of control at times and requires some pruning. Well, it’s been fifteen months since the last big clean-out. For the longest time, the collection seemed manageable. Despite my font junkie-ness, I hadn’t really been accumulating new ones at a very rapid rate–until recently. Tonight as I was trying to pick a font for a project, I realized that things are once again out of control. At this moment, I have right at 700 fonts on my computer–if you don’t count bold, italic, and bold italic versions of the font faces that have them. Something has to be done. My big plan is to sort through the masses of fonts on this machine and cull it down to, hopefully, somewhere around 400 fonts. 400 sounds pretty reasonable…at least to me… I always hate the process–I have to hem and haw over every font. Realistically, though, I know there are a bunch in there that I’ve never used and will never use. In general usage, there are only a handful of fonts that I pretty much turn to over and over again. For web design, I have a group of 5-7 sans-serif fonts and a group of 5-7 serif fonts that I pretty much stick to consistently. I may change the order in the stylesheet on occasion, but basically, there are only about 10-14 fonts I use for web design. I have the group of fonts that windows and applications use–like Times New Roman, Arial, and Wingdings. I have another group of fonts that gets to see some play in graphics making–probably about 15-20 that I turn to over and over again… I really don’t need 700 fonts ready and waiting… If I need something unusual, I can just load it temporarily. It’s not like I really need 400 either, but you know, it makes me feel better.

The Photoshop-related collections are something that really only got started in the last year or so. For the longest time, I just used the basic brushes that came with Photoshop, then I started checking out a few sites, and before I knew it… I have no clue how many brush sets I have, but I do usually do better managing the brushes than the fonts. I have the bulk of them organized in a folder outside of the photoshop presets one. They’re sorted loosely into favorite brushes and infrequently used brushes. Below those categories, I have them organized into folders by brush type–lyric brushes, 100×100 icon brushes, large texture brushes, etc. It works pretty well. Still, I’m trying to curb that somewhat. I think the important thing should be that I not have so many brushes that I forget all what I have…

Textures are a bit more of a problem. I have I don’t know how many sets of 100×100 textures for icons, and I’m also accumulating quite a set of larger ones too that I can use for wallpapers. The larger textures are rare, so I’ll most likely be keeping all of those, but I really need to do something about the smaller ones. A lot of them are similar to each other. Some of them, after looking at them again, aren’t that great or I know I just won’t use. They need to go.

Tutorials is another area that needs beating into submission. It started innocently enough with looking at tutorials sites and picking up the occasional hint. Then, I started reading a couple of graphics tutorial communities on livejournal–mainly looking for hints on coloring and image effects. Now, I’ve saved so many of those (as .mht web archive files) that I have no clue what’s what. I’m going to have to cull some of those out and sort what’s left so when I want to find that tutorial on the blue/tan coloring, I know where to find it.

I’m leaving in basically two weeks for a short trip home to Kentucky. Sorting through part of this mess on the computer is definitely on the agenda. Perhaps once I get it all sorted down to non-overwhelming numbers, I can actually set down and make something in photoshop or for the web…

I realize this blog entry is likely as dull as paint drying, but then again, I know who all is likely reading and probably more than one of you needs to go to font-aholics anonymous and photoshop stuff -aholics anonymous with me. But, you all understand what it’s like…all the pretty fonts, and brushes, and textures, and tutorials…and it’s all free…and it’s all so addictive.. and you just can’t help yourself… Or, at least I can’t. I’m sure once this is all cleaned out, I’ll just start up again and in another 15 months, I’ll be trying to wade through it all once again.