Ever since I started Notebook, I’ve been occasionally posting “font sightings” and I even have a special category for them. It worked okay, but the samples I’ve posted here have been kind of small, and I thought it would be really neat if, somehow, all the Coquette sightings could appear on the Coquette page, for example.

For a while I’ve had this idea of using Flickr as part of a new and improved Font Sightings system. I finally stopped thinking about it and did it. It was actually pretty easy, if a bit tedious.

I already had about a bunch of photos of font sightings in Aperture, and I picked about a hundred of the best ones. After spending some time naming and tagging them, I used the Aperture Flickr upload plug-in to get them all up on Flickr.

The second step was to add some special code (from Flickr) to the font pages and Notebook to display a set of three random sighting and provide a link to the appropriate photos on Flickr (see the top of the column to the right).

So far, I’ve only uploaded what I already had in Aperture. I still need to add all the stuff people have sent me over the years (thanks to all who have), plus all the stuff I don’t have photos of yet. Some fonts aren’t yet represented mostly because I didn’t have sightings of them in Aperture. These will be coming soon. Some of them, like the newer ones and poor old Sharktooth, I’ve just never seen used yet.

From now on, new font sightings will appear on Flickr and (randomly) on the right-hand column of Notebook and the font pages. The “Font Sightings” category for Notebook is basically dead. Long live Font Sightings!

If you have seen any of my fonts out in the wild, or maybe have created designs using them, feel free to send photos or scans to mark@marksimonson.com.