Monthly Archives: September 2012
Romney campaign caught up in font licensing kerfuffle
September 25th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
The Romney/Ryan presidential campaign is the most recent group to get caught up in the mires of font licensing.
Last week, James T. Edmonson, creator of Wisdom Script found his typeface used on a Romney campaign t-shirt. The unfortunate rub? He has no record of anyone from the Romney campaign purchasing a commercial use license of the font.
When contacted, the Romney campaign responded appropriately, and took down the t-shirt in question. Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul responded, “We take licensing matters seriously. We are looking into the matter.” An encouraging response.
Design work can be an exhilarating experience, especially if you’re creating political work that could be seen by thousands, even millions of people. You want to have the best tools to get the job done, and this includes a wide variety of fonts.
With projects like this, it is essential that you ensure that you’ve purchased the proper licensing of the fonts used in the project.
You can get yourself in trouble by:
- Using a non-commercial free font in a commercial project without purchasing the commercial license.
- Using standard desktop fonts as web fonts without purchasing a web license.
- Not reading and understanding the licensing of fonts in your collection.
Previous presidential campaigns have also gotten themselves into trouble as well. Republican candidate Rick Santorum was also caught up when his design agency, Raise Digital, converted a desktop font for use on the web, resulting in a lawsuit for $2 million.
Best thing that you can do for you and your team is:
- Get your fonts organized using a font manager. For teams, a server-based font management solution is critical.
- Purchase enough licenses for your entire team
- Fully understand the terms of your font licenses
- If you’re not sure if your font is licensed, remove it from your workflow until licensed copies are obtained.
Learn more about font management on the Extensis website.
Update Available: Universal Type Client version 3.3 adds Mountain Lion & Photoshop CS6 support
September 24th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Today we released an update to the Universal Type Client (v3.3) that adds full compatibility with Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), adds a new font auto-activation plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS6, and fixes a number of known issues.
The update is available free of charge to all existing Universal Type Server 3 customers.
To take advantage of the new features, download and install the updated client software.
NOTE: To take advantage of the Adobe CS6 plug-ins, be sure to install the CS6 first, followed by the update to the Universal Type Client. The client installer automatically locates your CS6 applications and places the new plug-ins in the appropriate locations.
Web designers need iPads too, right?
September 24th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
UPDATE: Thanks to all of you who entered. The iPad drawing is now closed.
Congratulations to the iPad winner, Jim Keppel!
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This week we will be joining a large group of talented design professionals at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC.
In conjunction with the event, we are excited to be giving away a new iPad.
The cool part? We’re opening up the drawing to absolutely everyone, whether you’re able to attend the event or not.
*Void where prohibited, see contest page for full details.
Digital asset management resources for university photographers
September 21st, 2012 by Edward Smith
Photographers within educational organizations regularly deal with high-res photos—a whole bunch of them. When your job is photographing ceremonies, sporting events, students,faculty, staff, campuses, buildings, and more you will eventually end up with a large hoard of digital media to manage. That is why an efficient digital asset management system is an important part of any university photographer’s workflow.
That’s also why I attended the 2012 University Photographers’ Association of America Symposium to discuss digital asset management best practices along with real world examples from university photographers. The Symposium was hosted by the UPAA — an organization founded in 1961 by a small group of university photographers in the New England area. Since then their membership has grown to include photographers from across the United States, Canada, Australia and Israel.
If you weren’t able to attend the Symposium, I’ve published the presentation along with other useful resources for academic photographers:
University Photographer Resources
XOXO Festival Urges Trust, Innovation and Direct Consumer Contact
September 19th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Last weekend, I was fortunate to attend the XOXO Festival in our hometown of Portland, Oregon. The festival brought all sorts of folks into town from all over the country and beyond.
The conference focused on the bringing individuals and businesses who are changing the way that they approach business. From Kickstarter and Etsy to Julia Nunes and Dan Harmon, presenters focused on a people-centric, respectful approach to B2C selling. Heck, in this case, since many of the businesses were so small, you would even define it as C2C (Customer to Customer) selling.
Kickstarter and Etsy have clearly had a direct impact on the lives of many people, and have clear goals to connect fans (consumers) to creators. The business model seems to be working well for consumer driven products. It’s still to be seen how this could affect the B2B market (someone’s gotta make the steel beams that go into our buildings), but exciting nonetheless.
I really admire the way that Etsy has taken their corporate mission and pushed it into everything that they do, including registering their company as a B Corporation, ensuring that they are holding their business to the highest standards of corporate ethics.
The rise of Kickstarter programs to pre-fund development has been widely reported over the past year, with a significant number of consumer-driven videogame projects with one million US dollar plus budgets. This clearly shows the direct connection and belief that consumers are starting to have in the purchase and support of products that they use.
I’d like to see the translation of that into more areas of the consumer’s life. The “everything should be free” model on the internet is becoming a bit passee. Nonprofit Cash Music seeks to solve this problem, and described in their presentation how their framework can be used by artists to sell, stream or share their music directly to the consumer and ask for compensation directly. Definitely a more direct creator to consumer model.
The trust of the consumer is definitely a positive approach. I really hope that the business/consumer relationship is changing. For example, I’ve been working to create a more direct conversation between you and Extensis for years on the Extensis blog, twitter and basically wherever conversations happen on the internet for about 6 years now. We want to hear from you, and encourage you to let us know what you like, don’t like, and how we can make our products even better for you. Thanks for the feedback so far, let’s definitely keep the lines of communication open.
Some of my favorite quotes from the XOXO festival include:
- “Work on some thing you’re passionate about because if it becomes successful you’ll have to do it all the time”
- “A startup is like a cross country trip. Money is gas in the tank. You’re not on a tour of gas stations.” Matt Haughey, Metafilter
- “We can’t spend our time worrying about [copycats]. Our time is best spent innovating.” Studio Neat founders Dan Provost & Tom Gerhardt
- “2012 is the year of the game.” – Yancey from Kickstarter
- “It’s inevitable that at a large company you are a specialized tool” – Ron Carmel, World of Goo
- “Sometimes it’s best to jump off the cliff and build the plane on the way down.”
- “If you are an artist, outsource everything that doesn’t pertain to making the art.” Jen Bekman
- “The old distribution system is based on restriction… New system is about openness. It’s about trust an respect.” Jamie Wilkinson, VHX
- “I know a lot about the NTSC standard, which makes me a hit at parties with the ladies” Josh Reich of Simple
- “To be successful, a creator needs just 1000 people who will reliably buy their products.”
- “The money will come. What you need to do is keep doing what’s instinctive to you which is ‘connect’.” Dan Harmon, Creator of Community
- “Culture is a conversation.” Adam Savage, Mythbusters/Tested
Don’t take my word for it, this conference was innovative, interesting and thought provoking. I was amazed at how positive, friendly and engaging everyone was at the event. I met people from all over the country, from whom I expect big things in the future (you know who you are.)
For more, see Anil Dash’s liveblog posts of the event, Wired, Willamette Week (featuring a picture of my back), New York Times, Medium, Kottke and so many more.
Andy Baio and Andy McMillan did a great job pulling this together, and it’s a welcome addition to ever evolving way that we connect with each other as people, consumers, fans and content creators. I look forward to what comes next.
Win a conference pass to GAIN: AIGA Design for Social Value
September 17th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who entered the contest! You shared a lot of really great creative work in the comments. I encourage everyone to browse through some of the awesome projects listed below.
Congratulations to Jonathan Silberman of Fearless Future who was randomly selected as the winner! The work that he was inspired by was the current online work of GOOD.
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We love the intersection of good art and social values. Cool thing is that that’s the theme of the AIGA GAIN conference in San Francisco this year, Design + Business = Social Value.
Conference details:
- October 9-10, 2012
- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
We’re proud to sponsor the event, and in doing so we’re able to give away a pass to one lucky winner.
To enter, tell us your current favorite design work in a comment on this post.
It can be one of your current projects, a project that you admire, even something that aroused your emotions enough that it was memorable. Anything goes. One entry per person, please.
A winner will be chosen at random at the end of business, Friday, September 21st, Pacific time. Good luck!
We hope to see you at the event!
IMPORTANT NOTE: Prize includes ticket to the conference only. Winner responsible for all travel and accommodations.
Every character in Unicode displayed in a video
September 14th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Check this out. Here’s a video that displays every character that’s included in Unicode 6.0, all 109.242 of them. I dare you to watch the entire thing!
decodeunicode from Siri Poarangan on Vimeo.
What does “digital asset” mean?
September 11th, 2012 by Edward Smith
To understand what digital asset management is, it helps to understand what the term “digital asset” means. And since I’m a nice guy and want to help you understand things—especially things related to digital asset management—I went ahead and wrote an article over at the DAM Learning Center for that purpose.
Go check it out, it’s called “What’s a digital asset? Defining the asset in digital asset management“. You can thank me later.
UPDATED: Font Management Best Practices in OS X, now includes Apple’s Mountain Lion
September 7th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
Fresh from a recent overhaul, our Font Management Best Practices Guide for OS X is new and ready for your inspection. This update includes OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion information, as well as a slew of other helpful details.
Have you ever wanted to take control of all of the fonts on your Mac? This 29 page document will show you all of the ins, outs and nitty-gritty details, including:
- Collecting and cleaning your font collection
- Culling duplicate fonts
- Eliminating corrupt fonts
- Understanding font management tasks
- Selecting a font management application
- Much, much more
Download the Font Management Best Practices Guide for OS X
Suitcase Fusion 4 font auto-activation plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS6 now available
September 6th, 2012 by Jim Kidwell
A free update to our flagship font manager, Suitcase Fusion 4 (v15.0.3) is now available.
This update adds a font auto-activation plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS6 to the list of applications supported by Suitcase Fusion 4, in addition to some optimizations for Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion (10.8).
NOTE: You may have already been notified of this update via the auto-update feature within Suitcase Fusion 4.
To download via the “Check for Updates” feature:
- Launch Suitcase Fusion 4
- Choose Suitcase Fusion 4 > Check for Updates (Mac) or Tools > Check for Updates (Windows)
- Download and install the update.
To download directly:
- Download the latest installer from the Suitcase Fusion 4 Support page.
- The new version can be installed directly on top of the previous version.
Install the new plug-ins using the Plug-in manager by:
- Choose Suitcase Fusion 4 > Manage-Plug-ins (Mac) or Tools > Manage Plug-ins (Windows)
- Enable plug-ins for supported applications.
See this list for full product compatibility information.
