Font-Journal: Exclusive Original Fonts and Site Update

As many of you know, I am the fontmaster at Font-Journal.  Over the past year I have been pretty busy trying to save my work from disappearing completely.  I create a lot of freeware (and some shareware) graphics, website templates and fonts.  But, a rash of hard disk drive errors over the past year has thrown me for a loop.

A year ago, I had to recover from my first hard disk drive crash.  Although devastating, I seemed to be able to recover almost everything from backups on an external hard drive.  I even purchased a network attached storage drive device to help automate the backup process.

But six months afterwards (just over six months ago), the 1 TB hybrid 2.5" Seagate SSHD I used to replace the old failed Seagate 750 GB hard drive that crashed, failed without warning in a very hard crash.  Seagate has already replaced the hybrid drive that failed (as it was still under warranty), but I am still digging through old SDCards, MicroSDCards, Memory Stricks, Compact Flash, Flash Jump Drives and external hard drives trying to recover my files and data.  You see, I could never get that WD My Cloud NAS (newtwork attached storage) drive device to work right.

There was no way to recover the Seagate files and data.  I used all sorts of tools carefully trying to recover my data.  I even considered using a forensics lab to recover my work.  But I knew that I had just about everything up to 6, or now 7 months ago.

I am missing all of my font projects, but I do have all of my last distributed freeware/shareware font projects.  I am missing some photos and video here and there, but have most of it.  Some of my older video is missing the audio, though.

As for the rest, I am missing the work I did on websites and graphics for that 6 month time frame.  I seem to have all my music, though.

Losing my font and art projects was kind of a blow, though.  I had some pretty important (to me) projects that were much further along.  Now I have to restart them.

I now have the WD My Cloud NAS drive device working, but it is completely unreliable.  A tech walked me through recovering it and resetting it to factory specs, but it still falls off the network.  I added two USB 3 hard drives to the router, but I cannot access them through the network (I will be calling the tech about the new AC router, as well).

Clearly, technology isn't improving.  It is breaking easier and more quickly.  Heck, none of this stuff is even making it to the warranty expiration period.  And if a product is replaced, you get someone else's repaired device that some tech may or may not have fixed (and usually not, these things usually have multiple issues and the tech only addressed one because of time quotas on the job).

I laid-out some extra bucks for a 500 GB Samsung SSD 850 Pro.  I have spent 6 of the past 7 months recovering files.  I have setup backup options that still aren't working because of hardware and/or software failures.  I am completely exhausted from reorganizing my files, backing up files and images, yet it is NOT even done until I have a NAS solution that works.

In the past 3 months I quit my regular 'part time' job in order to attend more to my website and graphic design venture.  Which, of course, was complicated by all these hard drive failures.  So, I am busy just trying to get a little work together so that I can put some meat on the table every once in a while.

However, I have been trying to keep the Font-Journal updated with new fonts.  Lately, I have been adding a lot of web fonts that are ok for commercial use from Vernon Adams (view the entire catalog of available Vernon Adam fonts available at Font-Journal).  I do have more to add, and I will be doing so as time permits.  There are a few freeware fonts that are OK for commercial use by other designers, too.

I am also interested in starting some new font projects.  I am actually looking into doing some more professional freeware web fonts (OK for commercial use) that I will distribute exclusively through the Font-Journal PC TrueType font repository and catalog.  However, in order to do so, I have to look into crowd funding of the project, because now my spare time is getting scarce.  Let me know if you are interested.  I will detail possible projects in a few posts at a later date.

Font-Journal already does have some freeware fonts that I created which are distributed exclusively through the Font-Journal.com website.  But I am looking to sort of grow my personal font creations catalog into a font foundry of my own like Ray Larabie or Vernon Adams.  In order to do that, I need more professional software than the free tools I have been using.

I have already purchased some Fontlab products and I am looking to get a more professional editor now, like Fontographer.  I have already produced some freeware fonts, and my catalog is available at http://www.font-journal.com/search.php?q=Doug+Peters

But I will have to use crowd funding in order to do more projects.  Still, as I have been using free tools online previously, the quality of my typography definitely suffers due to the limitations of these free tools.  Is my portfolio even good enough to ask for crowd source funding, now that I have lost my last few projects that I was hoping would put me over the top?

Let me know, guys and gals.  Thanks!