Monthly Archives: August 2012
Please Vote for Extensis to Present at SXSW Interactive 2013
August 30th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
SXSW Interactive is a great place to learn all about the important online, marketing and development trends, and we’re happy to be a part of it! We’ve been exhibiting at SXSW for the past three years, and are now ready to step it up and present.
We have developed four talks that we hope that you’ll find interesting, and give us a ‘thumbs up’ over on the SXSW voting site.
First, create a SXSW account.
Next, check out our talks below and click the “thumbs up” for the talks that you find interesting:
- Rebooting a Fugly brand
- Don’t use Comic Sans on that!
- Font Detective, Extra Bold
- Are you a digital hoarder?
We hope that you’ll vote for our submissions!
Win a pass to the sold out XOXO Festival in Portland
August 27th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Want to rub shoulders with Mythbuster Adam Savage? Trade witticisms with TV show Community creator Dan Harmon? Meet the creators of important, disruptive sites such as Kickstarter, Etsy, Simple and 4chan?
There’s not better place to do it than the upcoming XOXO festival in Portland, Oregon. With attendance capped at a couple of hundred, this is definitely the time and place to learn more about how they got started, exchange ideas and maybe come up with your next project that will change the world.
We’ve got one ‘golden’ ticket to give away to the event, and you’re invited to put your name into the hat. To do so, you’ll just need a twitter account to send a quick tweet.
Full instructions over on the WebINK blog. Better hurry though, entries are only being accepted this week.
Hope to see you there, and good luck!
Extensis Company Picnic
August 20th, 2012 by Jennifer Grebil
It’s a rare occasion that we can get everyone in one location at any given time, but last week 98% of Extensis employees converged to the Portland home office for a week full of meetings and a lot more meetings.
On Friday, we held our first company picnic in over a decade at Sellwood Park, which is one of Portland’s most beautiful & historic parks.
Extensis Motorcycle Gang
Our event started with lunch catered by Fuddruckers and holy mother was it delicious! We dined on your typical picnic fare of hamburgers, hotdogs, potato salad and beer. Fuddruckers served us ridiculous sized hotdogs placed in under proportioned buns.
Extensis is known to treat their employees very well. After lunch, there was a raffle drawing and anyone who attended the picnic was entered into a drawing for all sorts of goodies. Prizes included gift cards, massages, Portland Timbers tickets, iPods, an Amazon Kindle, and the grand prize of an iPad. In addition to the raffle, Extensis employees were given hats and t-shirts with our newly branded logo. We even had Extensis branded cotton candy. How cool is that?
The grand prize winner of the raffle was John Parnaby from our Australian office. John won the iPad and promptly traded it for an old Mac Cube won by Thomas Phinney. Granted the Mac Cube is a collector’s item amongst Mac enthusiasts, but if that’s not Mac love, I don’t know what is.
After the raffle, we played Kickball, Horseshoes and Croquet.
Extensis Croquet Crew
Extensis Kickball
This year’s company picnic was my most favorite Extensis event ever!
Extensis (most of us)
Extensis Europe
FontDoctor Updated to Support OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
August 16th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Today we released an update to the Mac version of FontDoctor to support OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion.
The new version can be downloaded from the FontDoctor support page.
SXSW Submission: Font Detective, Extra Bold
August 16th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Did you know that the typography used in a document can help identify whether a document is real or fake?
In this SXSW submission, Thomas Phinney will present his clues and conclusions from several cases he has been called into as a font detective, including a forged will, legislated point size requirements, a seemingly fake rabbi, an NFL Hall of Fame induction, and documents about President Bush’s National Guard service.
Learn how mistakes in typography, printing and font selection ruined what could have otherwise been perfectly good forgeries!
Please take a minute to vote for this session.
Other Extensis submissions
Looking for other great stuff from us? Check out these options. We hope that you’ll vote for them as well!
- Rebooting a Fugly Brand by Amanda Paull
- Don’t Use Comic Sans on That! by Jim Kidwell
- Are You a Digital Hoarder by Edward Smith
Update Now Available: Universal Type Server 3.2
August 15th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Today we released an update to Universal Type Server (v3.2). This update includes a number of fixed issues relating to directory services and other minor server issues.
The update is available free of charge to all existing Universal Type Server 3 customers who have an active Annual Service Agreement.
SXSW Submission: Are You A Digital Hoarder?
August 15th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Do you have thousands of rich media files that you can’t make sense of? Do you find yourself breaking into a sweat when you try to find a file? Are you frequently unsure which file is the latest version? Are you secretly hoarding photos, videos and digital files on your hard drive so none of your colleagues can find them?
If so, then you might be a digital media hoarder.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. With the explosion of digital media assets over the past decade, there are hoarders everywhere.
In this SXSW submission, Edward Smith will give you the tough love that you need to get out from under that virtual pile of messy files. Please take a minute to vote for this session.
Other Extensis submissions
Looking for other great stuff from us? Check out these options. We hope that you’ll vote for them as well.
- Rebooting a Fugly Brand by Amanda Paull
- Font Detective, Extra Bold by Thomas Phinney
- Don’t Use Comic Sans on That! by Jim Kidwell
SXSW submission: Rebooting a Fugly Brand
August 14th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
We all know how important first impressions are. It can be the difference between success and failure in any relationship. The first impression any brand makes is critical to the introduction of new customers to your products.
In our next SXSW submission Rebooting a Fugly Brand is from our VP of Marketing, Amanda Paull.
She will present the dos and don’ts when diving into the icy cold waters of a brand refresh. As company that specializes in software for creative professionals, we recently underwent our own brand refresh. Amanda will share the secrets of how we arrived at our new visual identity (you’ve probably noticed the fish here on the blog) and how that identity conveys our company’s personality and values.
We hope that you’ll take a moment to vote for us!
Other Extensis submissions
Looking for other great stuff from us? Check out these options. We hope that you’ll vote for them as well.
- Are You a Digital Hoarder by Edward Smith
- Font Detective, Extra Bold by Thomas Phinney
- Don’t Use Comic Sans on That! by Jim Kidwell
NEW: WebINK plug-in for WordPress
August 14th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Today we’re happy to announce a new way to use web fonts with WordPress – the WebINK plug-in for WordPress.
This plug-in makes it easy to use web fonts on your WordPress site by allowing your site authors to select WebINK web fonts from the Font menu of the WordPress visual editor. No complex coding or knowledge of HTML and CSS required. Just good old web fonts.
What I learned at TypeCon 2012
August 13th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
With TypeCon 2012 recently concluded, I’ve had a bit of time to stew about what I learned from my time at the convention that encompasses all things typographic.
Since there were over 40 events, I’ll just give you the highlights.
Creative greatness is not typically a solo venture, and usually requires someone with good business sense partnered with the creative genius.
Oswald “Oz” Cooper, developer of the famous Cooper Black typeface, had a devoted partner Fred Bertsch whom he supported even after Bertch had to retire after mental breakdown from untreated syphilis.
Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the Linotype machine, is probably one of the greatest, but least widely known, inventors. Mergenthaler had not only a partner, but an entire board to market his genius. Unfortunately, Mergenthaler did not fare so well and died at the young age of 42 from tuberculosis, not recognizing his success and fortune from the Linotype machine.
Developing high quality OpenType Arabic typefaces is more that a little complex. Multiple contextual replacements can be the best solution to make the final script readable. Shaping and placement of letters is a challenge.
More than a little effort has been expended to determine the emotional response of people to fonts. Starting with small sample groups, this can easily be expanded to larger research samples.
“Every society rewrites its past, every reader rewrites its texts, and, if they have any continuing life at all, at some point every printer redesigns them.” D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and Sociology of Texts
Typesetting tools have changed dramatically over the years, they are no longer dangerous and are definitely much more efficient.
Beer is the most consumed drink in Columbia, replacing the previous favorited homemade fermented corn mush “Chicha,” that was banned in 1910 over health concerns and a desire for the increased tax base from beer.
You can get a new pangram (a sentence that uses every letter in the English languge) a day from http://dailypangram.tumblr.com/
Mark Simonson has a great little pangram creation helper tool on his site called the Pangram helper.
Kickstarter can be a great way to fund a typeface development project, just don’t expect it to take off immediately without continual love and effort.
The Medium is the Massage. Yes, that’s ‘massage’ not ‘message.’
Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum is one kickass place. Wish that I could spend a year perusing their catalog. We could easily have lost our WebINK PM, Brad Dunzer in there just playing with all of the tools.
The brain is programmed to notice change: motion, color, form and position in space.
“FMRI studies have studied that visual systems are faster at deciphering knowledge than language,” says Beth Koch.
7.5 maya are alive today. Two million speak the mayan language. Mayan has 20+ languages in total.
There are some pretty cool bits of chrome typography on cars.
SOTA always does a wonderful job putting together Typecon, and I look forward to returning in the coming years.
