I'd stick with the Adobe one and not even think it twice.

About the Corel one... In my opinion, you don't need that many typefaces. Specially not those.

Adobe! No doubt about it: Arno, Garamond Premier Pro, Kepler, Jenson, Helvetica, Univers, Utopia, Myriad, some weights of Gill Sans and Futura…

I am also a student, and I bought the adobe package and am happy with it. A lot of the fonts are "Pro" fonts with lots of opentype features, extended glyph sets, large families with different weights, optical sizes...

The PDF adobe provides is very long and hard to read - they used to have another PDF on this page: http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2008/03/ffee.html

but the link is dead now. I have the one-page PDF with a summary of the families that that page used to link to - how can I attach a PDF?.

Some of the non-Adobe-created families only have a few fonts, so they're kind of a teaser (DIN, Futura, Baskerville, Officina, etc.), but it's still great to have a legal copy of at least some of the weights of those great families.

There is a bunch of overlap with the fonts that come with Creative Suite, but I found it worth the price to get the additional fonts.

There's also this: http://www.adobe.com/education/products/typeclassics.html - slightly cheaper but not as good.

I keep meaning to do a chart showing the differences between the CS5, the FFEE, and the TypeClassics font lists. That would be useful...

The PDF I referred to is available here:

http://www.academicsuperstore.com/pdfs/FontFolioEducationEssentials_font...

I looked into it a bit more. There is actually not that much overlap between Adobe Font Folio Education Essentials and the fonts that come with CS5:

--Rosewood Std: both have 2 fonts
--Trajan Pro: both have 2 fonts
--Caslon Pro: both have 6 fonts
--Chaparral Pro: CS5 has 6 fonts, FFEE has 32
--Myriad Pro: CS5 has 12 fonts, FFEE has 40
--Adobe Garamond: CS5 has 4 fonts of Garamond Pro, FFEE has 34 fonts of Garamond Premier Pro

You’ll never need a Thousands of fonts, being they as cheap as they may.

MyFonts currently lists about 600 free fonts. Much crap, ok, but if you look into it you’ll find some very decent offerings adding to your basic starter set: e.g. Museo, Secca or Novel. In any case, check with the glyph contents of freefonts, it tends to be limited.

And, of course, you’re welcome to give Andron and Lapidaria a try as well ;-)

A more accurate link: http://new.myfonts.com/search/lowest_price%3A0/fonts/

As a student, it's certainly important to be aware of tradition and the mainstream, which is well represented by Adobe.
But typography is a practical discipline, and your education will be limited and limiting if you develop work habits in such a straight groove.

I wrote about this issue here; that was ten years ago (before OpenType), so the examples are out of date—but I stick by the theory and principle.

Despite having been the person on the Adobe side of formulating the FFEE package (along with some fabulous folks from AIGA), I would say... why not get both?

Yeah, if you can only get one, get the Adobe package. But if you can afford both, get them both.

That being said, the Adobe package by itself will give you plenty to work with and explore for a while.

Cheers,

T

This page in the Wiki might be of interest as well:

http://typophile.com/node/30047

They fixed the links I mentioned before, on this page:

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2008/03/ffee.html

Thank you all for the responses.

Mugford - Very helpful, yeah the overlap isn't necessarily that much and it seems like it still is a quality package at a ridiculous price, so I think I will be purchasing the education essentials to get started off. Thanks for taking the time to compile the links and the actual details of the adobe collection super helpful.

Andreas - Thanks for the suggestion, your right it is a bit novel to think that I need that many faces, I would spend hours looking at all the various fonts packages with the corel product, that I probably wouldn't get anything done design wise as I ogle through the list haha. Very nice suggestions though. Thank you.

Nick - Thanks for that link, that really put something in perspective for myself in regards to how I view the practice of typography, it was critically informative. Thank you.

Thomas - Your right, although I would need much restraint, purchasing the corel pack doesn't automatically mean I have to let myself drown in a sea of fonts, well taken advice. Thank you.

Aluminum - Yeah that was the page which actually led me to post this question as I wanted to deepen my knowledge of whats effective and not, thanks, that page is an invaluable source.

I guess one lesson that I came across is that even though this is a big start for myself, it is only a small step in my life long journey of type education it appears.

Considering training in IT can be a frustrating endeavour, a million and one acronyms for courses float around the internet and every man and his dog is trying to pull you one way or another.
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