Monthly Archives: November 2011
Extensis holiday giving
November 23rd, 2011 by Jennifer Grebil
For the Thanksgiving Holiday, Extensis teamed up with Portland’s Metropolitan Family Resources, a non-profit organization that provides emergency support services to families in need.
Though Metropolitan Family Resources doesn’t typically doesn’t offer a Thanksgiving program, they were gracious enough to assist Extensis by providing us with two families to adopt for the holiday.
A whole week of activities was planned at Extensis. For a small fee, employees could request customized drinks from Blue Kangaroo Coffee Roasters or have lunch brought in from Los Gorditos, but the main activity was the breakfast feast on Thursday. Customer Service whipped up bacon, sausage (fresh from the meat market), eggs and French toast.
All the hard work paid off, because when the donation drive was over, we had enough donations to provide each family with a Thanksgiving meal they won’t forget and a gift card to Fred Meyer (a local grocery store). Extensis also provided Metropolitan Family Resources with several gift cards to go towards other families in need this holiday season.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Metropolitan Family Center services, you can visit them at http://www.metfamily.org/.
Users and IT Departments Working Together for DAM Success
November 22nd, 2011 by Edward Smith
Are you a soon-to-be Portfolio Server user, someone in an IT department, or maybe a little bit of both? If so, head over to the DAM Learning Center for an article on combining the powers of end-users and IT for success with digital asset management.
The article begins with a “day in the life” of an Extensis Systems Engineer (yours truly) exemplifying what can go wrong when end user groups and IT groups don’t coordinate their efforts. I also provide 7 suggestions on how users and IT can make the most out of a digital asset management project.
Users vs. IT Departments: Working Together for Digital Asset Management Success
Google Web Fonts come to the Web Font Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop
November 8th, 2011 by Jim Kidwell
I’m happy to announce that today we have added Google Web Fonts to the Web Font Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. This further expands the creative options available to web designers directly from Adobe Photoshop. With both WebINK and Google Web Fonts now available from the plug-in, designers have thousands of fonts to choose from the mock-up phase of website development.
The FREE plug-in can be downloaded at www.webfontplugin.com immediately.
You may ask why we’ve chosen to develop a plug-in for Photoshop? From our extensive surveys of web designers, we identified that the vast majority begin the website design process in Adobe Photoshop. While some may use other tools such as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign or even begin by actually mocking up in code, most designers surveyed chose Photoshop as their initial digital version.
The Web Font Plug-in provides a dynamic connection to the Google Web Font service to provide up-to-date fonts directly in Adobe Photoshop. With the plug-in, designers don’t need to separately download and install fonts to have them be available for use in Photoshop. When new fonts are added to the Google Web Fonts list, they automatically appear in the plug-in.
David Kuettel, technical lead of Google Web Fonts told me why they chose to integrate Google Web Fonts with the plug-in. ”Integrating Google Web Fonts into the Extensis Web Font Plug-in reduces the pain of creating website comps using web fonts. The Web Font Plug-in gives designers expanded creative options and makes Google Web Fonts nearly ubiquitous for web designers and developers.”
The Web Font Plug-in now includes many popular open-source font families from Google Web Fonts, including Lobster, Droid Sans and Ubuntu. WebINK fonts are also available and include thousands of high-quality fonts from foundries like Dalton Maag, Mostardesign and Paratype.
To learn more about how to integrate Web Fonts into the Web Design process, please join us for a Webcast on November 29: How to Implement Web Fonts On Your Websites.
