We’re a fan of the folks over at CMS Wire. They have developed a good amount of digital asset management content that is frequently quite interesting. Of note, recently they published a survey to their readers that asked “What is your biggest Digital Asset Management challenge?”
The survey results are actually quite revealing, and if you’re considering implementing a solution soon, worth exploring. Leading the pack at this time is “Taxonomy/Metadata development.”
If you’re not familiar with metadata, it’s all of the information that can describe your digital asset. As an example, for a photograph, you have the EXIF data such as shutter speed, aperture, flash metadata that is automatically embedded by digital cameras. Yet in addition there are quite a few other pieces of data that you might want to capture that describe the image’s content, use in projects and so forth. When you have thousands of images to catalog, the process of tracking this type of metadata can become overwhelming if you don’t have established procedures.
To help you determine your own internal procedures, we’ve developed a list of 5 Tips for Advanced Metadata Management. Hopefully they’ll help you establish procedures that make your DAM workflow smooth and efficient.
Font Aid IV raises funds for the organization Doctors Without Borders through the creation and sale of a custom collaborative font created entirely of ampersands. You can participate by submitting your own ampersand, as well as by purchasing the finished typeface through a variety of typeface distributors.
Submit your black and white “ampersand” icon for the benefit font. It should be a vector image file, not a bitmap. Keep it simple, not too crazy. Send it in EPS format to fontaid@typesociety.org by January 29th, 2010.
When the font is available I’ll also post a link to the foundries that have it for sale.
Join us next week as Thomas Phinney, our Senior Font Product Manager, presents an insightful look into the world of font license compliance. He’ll share why font license compliance is of critical importance to any organization using even a few fonts and up to thousands in some cases.
Thomas has collected a number of real-life examples of companies who didn’t comply with font licensing, and the consequences that they faced. Thomas will guide you through options available to help you control your own font licensing and avoid similar situations.
There are many things to consider when selecting a digital asset manager. Selecting a piece of software that will potentially touch many, if not all members of your organization can be a daunting task.
The folks over at CMS Wire have been publishing some very fine content lately on their blog. Recently, they posted a guide of Six Things to Consider When Selecting a DAM solution. If you’re in the market for a digital asset manager for your office, the article mentions a number of concerns that we’ve been sharing with customers over the years. These include:
Setting project goals, expectations and responsibility
Evaluating the digital asset management solution on site, before purchase
If you’ve already thought through what you need, and are ready to bring a proposal to your boss, a while back we published a handy list of Top 10 Ways to Sell Digital Asset Management to your Boss. Hopefully this will help arm you with good arguments for your DAM solution (we hope that it’s Portfolio Server!).
Extensis products are localized so that they run in many different languages. For most of our products, we support English, French, German and Japanese languages. In addition, we are working to expand the language support for many of our products to include Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.
We’ve long been stressing the importance of font compliance. This means only using the fonts to which you have purchased an appropriate license.
Because fonts are so small, and many fonts come pre-installed with your operating system, people have a tendency to look at fonts as a “free” item.
In reality, the designers who create typefaces, and the fonts that we use on our computers, take a great deal of time to perfect the font faces that we use. Some designers have generously place some fonts for free out on the internet, but mostly, designers ask (and deserve) to be compensated for the months of work required to create a typeface.
Font piracy, and even inadvertent inappropriate usage is more common than many of us would like. Our Universal Type Server product line gives users the opportunity to track license usage. This allows you to run periodic compliance reports to be sure that all of the fonts in your workflow are licensed. And even catch those hard-to-identify instances when you may need to purchase just one more license… perhaps for your logo designer.
We are very proud to have been awarded a Best of the Decade Award from the online publication for creative professionals and cross-channel publishers, IT Enquirer.
This award recognizes the leaps and bounds in software development that has been made to the entire font management product line over the past decade. The many improvements over the past decade include:
Merging the two dominant font management product lines (Suitcase and Font Reserve) into a new, powerful font managers, Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type Server.
The integration of Font Sense technology to accurately match fonts used in documents.
Quick, reliable side-by-side previews of multiple fonts using custom text with QuickType.
The ability to tear-off previews from the application and allow them to float above all other windows.
Organizational features, such as Smart Sets, that allow users to quickly identify and activate fonts required for their projects.
Solid client-server font management with a focus on licensing compliance and consistency for font users as well as system administrators.
Thanks to IT Enquirer for recognizing the hard work that it takes to bring quality products to the creative community.
Over the past year, we’ve covered a wide range of digital asset management and font management topics in our webcasts. If you missed out viewing these live, I’m happy to share that we’ve provided a wide variety of these webcasts free of charge on our website.
Wondering what’s new in the Windows version of our single-user font manager, Suitcase Fusion 2? Well, there’s a whole lotta good stuff, and we’re just itching to show it off to you.
This upcoming Tuesday we have two webcasts that will provide you with a complete overview of all of the new features, and how they can make your font management experience better and more fun. There will be a Q & A period following the demo, so be sure to stick around so that we can answer any of your font management questions.
Please register for one of these upcoming webcasts. We look forward to it!
We’re a fan of the folks over at CMS Wire. They have developed a good amount of digital asset management content that is frequently quite interesting. Of note, recently they published a survey to their readers that asked “What is your biggest Digital Asset Management challenge?”
The 
Join us next week as Thomas Phinney, our Senior Font Product Manager, presents an insightful look into the world of font license compliance. He’ll share why font license compliance is of critical importance to any organization using even a few fonts and up to thousands in some cases.
There are many things to consider when selecting a digital asset manager. Selecting a piece of software that will potentially touch many, if not all members of your organization can be a daunting task.
A few upcoming webcasts to note, this time for those of you who speak French and German.
We’ve long been stressing the importance of font compliance. This means only using the fonts to which you have purchased an appropriate license.
Wondering what’s new in the Windows version of our single-user font manager, Suitcase Fusion 2? Well, there’s a whole lotta good stuff, and we’re just itching to show it off to you.
