A free web app that sorts the fonts on your Mac by style, plus a Figma plugin for the ones you keep. Live and in daily use on my 1,601-font library.
01 · Overview
How might we help designers find and keep the fonts they love, without paying for a font manager or uploading their library?
02 · Solution
Sort for me.
Keep what you love.
Try it together.
Use it in Figma.
03 · The problem
Designers collect fonts faster than they can organize them.
01
Too many useless fonts
Nearly half of Font Book is system and language support I’ll never design with.
02
Names say nothing
“Avenir Next Condensed” or “Optima” tells me nothing about how a font looks.
03
Good tools cost money
Paid managers charge a subscription; free ones are cluttered or abandoned.
04
Good fonts get lost
The one I loved last month is buried, and I can’t remember its name.
So I kept using the same five fonts over and over again.
I asked 11 designers: Can you recall your favorite fonts without looking? All said no.
Key insight: The problem isn’t storage, it’s recall.
This changed the brief. Kept didn’t need to manage files better. It needed to do the organizing for you and make it effortless to mark the keepers.
04 · Market research
05 · Design Process
Prove it first
With an AI assistant, I tested whether a browser can read Mac fonts. Chrome and Edge can (Local Font Access API). So the browser became the product.
Key Design Decision 01
From cards to hairlines
My first library was a grid of rounded cards with labelled control sections. It looked like every dashboard. I removed the cards, merged the controls into one quiet toolbar and let 1px lines do the grouping, so the specimens became the loudest thing on the page.
Key Design Decision 02
Sorting shelf by shelf
With system fonts hidden, there were still 219 families to review, too many for one sitting. I split the review by shelf, gave each shelf its own progress line, and made progress save as you go, with a line under the buttons that says so. Coming back shows “Pick up where you left off” with the exact shelf and count.
Key Design Decision 03
Only filters the data can support
I designed a Fontshare-style properties panel, then checked what font files reliably report. Weight, width, style count and x-height are measurable; contrast and edges are guesswork. I shipped the four honest ones and cut the rest.
06 · Design system
One vocabulary for design and code.
Direction
Before building, I moved every screen into Figma and turned the visual rules into variables, so design and code share the same names.
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Type and color
Instrument Serif for page titles, Geist for the interface, Geist Mono for labels. A warm paper ground and near-black ink in light mode, reversed in dark.
07 · Building and shipping
No server, no account, and nothing leaves the computer.
How it sorts a library
After one permission prompt, Kept reads the classification data type designers put in each font file: PANOSE numbers, style class and whether it’s monospaced. Names fill the gaps; for fonts with no data, it draws a capital I and checks for serifs.
Designing around constraints
Constraints
My mitigations in design
Chrome and Edge only
Clear message + file drop anywhere
Progress in one browser
Auto-save + backup file
Access feels risky
“Read-only. Kept never installs, moves or deletes fonts.”
Empty Library
Its own “no fonts found” state, separate from “access blocked”
08 · Extending into Figma
Kept, now in Figma.
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Click a font to use it. The whole row applies the font to the selected text, keeping bold as bold and italic as italic.
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Pairs, applied by size. Auto gives the largest text the heading font, the smallest the caption font and the rest the body font.
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From pair to system. One click inserts a pair card or a full specimen, or creates Figma text styles named after the pair.
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Bring it over from the web. Load a Kept backup and your bookmarks, pairs and notes appear.
Designing the handoff
I prioritized explaining how data moves between two products. First-time users get a three-step guide. Returning users see their pairs with one line on top, “Changed anything in Kept? Bring it over with a fresh backup,” plus the date they last loaded one.