Monthly Archives: January 2010
Font Aid IV – raising money for Haiti
January 25th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) has launched Font Aid IV, a project that will raise funds for the relief efforts in Haiti.
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.
Font licensing compliance, it can affect your company’s bottom line
January 21st, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
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.
Choose from two different webcast times.
North American webcast details
- January 26th, 2010
- 11:00 AM (Pacific) / 2:00 PM (Eastern)
- Register for this FREE Webcast
European webcast details
- January 28th, 2010
- 3:00 PM GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)/ 4:00 PM CET (Central European Time)
- Register for this FREE Webcast
If you register but can not attend we will email you a link to the webcast recording.
Things to consider when selecting a digital asset management solution
January 19th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
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
- Establishing an effective workflow
In addition to reading this post, I highly recommend checking out our Digital Asset Management Best Practices Guide. This guide covers all of these concerns and more in detail.
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!).
French and German Webcasts focus on Portfolio NetMediaMAX
January 15th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
A few upcoming webcasts to note, this time for those of you who speak French and German.
On January 20th and 21st, we’ll be demonstrating how NetMediaMAX can assist in image processing workflows.
NetMediaMAX allows users to:
- Create composite PDF proofs from various files without opening multiple applications.
- Batch resize your images, convert to a different file format and resize for Web usage and save your preferences.
- Deliver digital files via self-service web portals and allow others to export low-res files of the originals on-the-fly.
- Automatically create multiple derivatives of your originals and even apply destructive watermarks for protection.
Register for one of our two webcasts. Choose the appropriate event based on language:
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.
Noncompliance of font licences can lead to embarrassment and worse
January 14th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
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.
So yesterday when it was revealed that Hadopi, the French anti-piracy group, had used an inappropriately licensed font in the creation of their logo, they had more than a little egg on their face.
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.
Extensis wins “Best of the Decade” award!
January 5th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
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 our entire range of font management products, including our Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type Server product lines.
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.
