This is my current font panel. Even with only system default fonts installed, it's 2550px high. The system provides over 130 fonts by default, but extremely few of them are ever useful to an every day designer.

Hover over this image to see which of the fonts I'd actually use.

Five fonts.

96% wasted space.

That's how much space is wasted here with fonts I'll never use. I don't plan on using Microsoft Yi Bati, Wingdings, or Myanmar Text Extralight Script Nueuo anytime soon. Looking around for solutions to this, I dove into the land of font managers. Initially they seemed to be exactly what I needed.

Except they weren't. Sure I could disable fonts in the font manager, but if they were a system font programs that used them would fail gloriously. Webpages would show □□□□□ in place of the missing fonts. Titlebars would be empty. Icons would be without labels.

Rather than wait for a better solution to present itself, I decided to have a run at redesigning the font panel as I'd like to have it. Here's what I came up with.