Font browser and organizer for freelance vector designers

The moment happens when a designer is mid-project, needs a display font that feels right for a client's brand, and spends 20 minutes clicking through an alphabetical dropdown list with no visual sample next to each name — or worse, has to click each font individually to see it applied, as multiple users described. The gap persists because font management sits awkwardly between the OS, the design app, and cloud font services — each vendor treats it as someone else's problem. Adobe has incentive to funnel users toward its own font subscription; OS-level font managers don't know anything about design context; and the design app vendors aren't font companies. Nobody owns the experience end to end, so it stays broken.

What's specifically broken, per the complaints: previews require clicking rather than hover-scrolling, fonts appear in the wrong color during preview (opposite of the background, stripping context), sorting is alphabetical-only with no filtering by category like script or serif, and fonts that come from sync services cause crashes. There's also no way to preview a font in your actual document text without committing to it.

This is a recurring business, not a one-time fix, because designers work across clients and projects constantly — font selection happens on every new job. A freelancer doing 3-5 projects a month is making this decision dozens of times a year. The cost of a bad font choice isn't just aesthetic: client revision rounds cost real hours. A tool that lets designers build tagged collections ('my go-to sans-serifs for tech clients', 'handwritten options under 3 weights') and preview them against real document text earns its keep on every project.

What to build

Build a standalone macOS/Windows font browser that reads all locally installed fonts, lets designers type sample text and see live previews in configurable sizes, filter by category (serif, script, display, monospace), and save tagged collections that export as font shortlists — no design app open required.

Where to start

Start with Affinity Designer users specifically — they have no native cloud font service to fall back on and have complained loudly about font management lacking features that Illustrator at least partially addresses, so they're more acutely underserved and more motivated to adopt an external tool.

The hard part

Font rendering outside a design app requires either bundling a rendering engine or relying on OS APIs that behave differently across macOS and Windows versions — getting previews that look identical to what the design app actually renders is non-trivial and if they don't match, the tool loses trust immediately.

How it makes money

One-time purchase around $29-49, with an optional $5/month sync tier that backs up tagged collections to the cloud and syncs across machines.