Obsessions Realized

I have been working since 12:30 this afternoon - it's now 3:45 - on creating a label for a new product line I'm making. Now, I love to make labels, actually it's therapeutic for me, but in the process of creating, all the 'issues' I struggle with become glaringly apparent. The big one being distraction. I'm not talking about the looking out the window at the birds kind of distraction, but the 'let's find a new font' distraction that leads me on a chase to achieve the prefect look for this undistinguished label.

It was fifteen minutes I spent looking for a particular style font before I realized what I was doing. You may be thinking finding new fonts is all part of the job and it is to a certain extent, but I seem to go overboard, and even as I was downloading my seventh free font, I considered I may be a font collector.

I believe a font collector is similar to a recipe collector of which I am one also. I clip or download as the case may be, recipes/fonts for future use. Makes perfect sense to me. However if I look into those yucky parts of my psyche I see I am looking for perfection - my own kind.

For the recipes it's a dish that embodies a full rich family life with lots of happy children cavorting around the kitchen and a mother smiling fondly after them. Dad's in the recipe too, but just barely, perhaps the salt or pepper. Am I dating myself? You bet. As I'm writing this I'm saying to myself, "Oh my God, I'm looking for Donna Reed in every recipe I clip!" What an illusion I have held on to.

It's the same thing with the fonts. I want this new label to show that this product has integrity, it does what it's supposed to do, the formulator knows her stuff, has her customers well being in her mind, and that it's more natural than L'Oreal. A tall order for a simple little assortment of letters, but that's the way it is and the marketing folks call it branding the product. I don't know how many fonts I have on my computer, but it's more than enough to take care of any typography needs that might arise, but yet I still collect.

I guess that's the way it is with us collectors. Rarely do we delve into the reality of having closets bursting with antique hats or shelves buckling from the unread first editions of obscure authors sure to be famous. Maybe we just like the hunt (like my search for Beanie Babies), or we like stuff, or in my case we are trying to capture the unattainable dream.