Sometimes my fonts directory can be a great source of inspiration when getting started designing a logo. For years I used The Font Thing which seemed to be one of the best freebies around for previewing custom text in multiple, selected fonts at once as well as managing, archiving and installing/uninstalling fonts.

Unfortunately, The Font Thing hasn't been updated since 1999 and was a little bit shaky when previewing folders with a large amount (500+) of fonts.

So, colour me chuffed when I took another look on SnapFiles and stumbled on NexusFont by xiles. It looks a bit wack, with a clunky interface and black gradients, but who cares, this thing is working a treat:

• view text in several installed fonts, or fonts in folders
• favourites provide a simple tagging system to group your fonts, wherever they are
• right-click install/uninstall
• select several fonts to preview and print
• custom text in previews: face, style, size and colour
• quick to read in large folders of fonts and lots of currently installed fonts

Note the latest version should be grabbed from xiles.net rather than SnapFiles, it seems they're a couple of release candidates behind. Oh yes, its Windows only - I'm afraid I'm still a Windows boy on my desktop for designing and illustrating... anyone know of anything similar for Linux?