As part of the free font (or fonts) I add each Friday to the Fonts Unleashed collection, I provide a thumbnail. It is just one character from the font. For those who haven’t looked, I tend to change the sample letter used approximately once a year. As I’ve been doing this for four years now, the current thumbnail letter is “D”.

Most of the time I use a solid fill on the thumbnails, but occasionally I decide to dress up the thumbnail a bit with a different type of fill. In the thumbnail of the Snowgoose fonts at right, I used two fountain fills for the two distinct fonts in the collection to make the letter and the snow look a bit more realistic. As CorelDRAW is the main tool in my toolbox, I used it to create the fountain fills.

In the thumbnail for the Colourbars font at left, there are clearly three colors to play on the name of the font. A font cannot contain multiple colors. So this is again nothing more than a fountain fill created in CorelDRAW. You can do something similar in most any design software. It is just a matter of being creative and choosing a fill that is the best fit for the text in your design.

While this may seem very intuitive for some of you, it is a question I’ve been asked when I post a font with a multi-colored thumbnail. I’m just trying to be a little creative with the thumbnails.