Category Archives: publishing
Leading Magazine Publishers Select Universal Type Server 3 to Safeguard Against Costly Lawsuits
December 5th, 2011 by Edward Smith
We’d like to bring your attention to three leading magazine publishers that are using Universal Type Server to manage and distribute fonts to their publishing groups across the globe to secure font compliance across their organizations. Washingtonian Magazine, MetroCorp and Future Publishing have selected Universal Type Server to ensure font compliance and avoid multi-million dollar font lawsuits as recently experienced by NBC
As you may know, font license agreements are just as strict as other software license agreements and come with substantial legal implications for misuse. NBC was recently served with a lawsuit for $2 Million by the Font Bureau Inc., a typographic design firm, which alleges that the network infringed the firm’s fonts in marketing material used to promote its shows.
Companies across the world rely on Universal Type Server to ensure font compliance and avoid these costly oversights.
Washingtonian Magazine, MetroCorp (publisher of Philadelphia Magazine and Boston Magazine) and Future Publishing have all recognized the benefits of a server-based solution over decentralized font management solutions in ensuring font compliance.
Ed Haynes, IT Customer Services Manager at Future Publishing states, “We publish over one hundred titles and Universal Type Server gives us consistency across all of them and provides us with font usage reporting, which is essential for us to monitor our compliance.”
As font use is a key element in the day-to-day running of these publishers, a system that ensures consistency and efficiency without inhibiting creativity is vital.
Colin McSherry, Associate Art Director/ Mac Tech Support at Philadelphia Magazine agrees, “Universal Type Server allows us to delegate a large portion of font management responsibilities to a server that monitors font compliance.”
According to Paul Chernoff, Director of Information Technology at Washingtonian Magazine “Universal Type Server makes it easy for The Washingtonian to distribute fonts used only for a specific article. Recording the font license directly in the server ensures that we don’t accidentally exceed the font’s license.”
Chernoff added, “Before we had Universal Type Server, we always bought licenses for our entire staff; Type Server has made it possible to buy fewer licenses by making font management easier.”
To learn how to keep your creative workflows safe and legal with effective font management, join Thomas Phinney (@thomasphinney), Extensis Senior Product Manager for Fonts and Typography, for this webcast recording that takes an insightful look into the world of font licensing.
Celebrating 10 years of Adobe InDesign
March 15th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
It’s hard to believe that Adobe InDesign has been around for 10 years now. Born from the kernels of Aldus Pagemaker, InDesign has grown up to be a standard publishing application that designers around the world rely upon.
In celebration, Adobe has released a free PDF e-book that chronicles the first 10 years. As expected, the book is well-designed and written. Download your free copy from http://www.indesign10anniversary.com/
We continue to develop font auto-activation plug-ins that work with InDesign for both our Suitcase Fusion 2 and Universal Type Server product lines. Download trial versions of either of these products from the Extensis website.
Suitcase Fusion 2 nominated for MacUser award
September 29th, 2009 by Jim Kidwell
I’m happy to announce that Suitcase Fusion 2 has been nominated for a MacUser award in the “Print Publishing of the Year” category.
Products in this category are drawn from the everything that has been reviewed in the last 12 months of MacUser magazine.
The winners (and runners up) will be announced at the MacUser Awards, held at the London Zoo on October 22, 2009.
As they say for Oscar nominations, it’s an honor to just be nominated, and we’ll be very happy if we win in this category. We’ll keep you posted.
Rube Goldberg in the Print Shop
April 20th, 2009 by Jim Kidwell
I’ve always loved a good Rube Goldberg setup. I don’t know whether these guys have too much time on their hands, or just had one too many Red Bulls during a latenight project. I had many a late night in the Photography Lab in college that turned to the weird side of things, so I’m betting on the latter. Go for Rube Goldberg!
via @Markzware
Legal Typography: They Oughta Pass A Law!
February 12th, 2009 by Kelly Guimont
OK that might be a bit extreme, but when I came across this site I was very impressed that anyone had given thought to something that a lot of people just take for granted: Typography For Lawyers. I like that Matthew Butterick is doing what he can as a lawyer to raise the level of typography knowledge (and by extension improve the aesthetic) which will make legal documents a bit easier to read. For most people, trying to sort out all the legalese in a document is hard enough but then to puzzle around a bad font choice too makes it even more difficult. I wonder how many deals have gone bad or fallen through altogether because all those pages of poor type and boilerplate were just too overwhelming.
Another nice thing about this site is that it explains typography to people as though they have never heard of it before and have no idea what it means. If you are a design person or even a plain old font nerd then for you this is desperately boring. However, if you know someone who needs a good place to start after asking “What do you mean by ‘different font’ exactly?”, this is a great place to start the uninitiated on a path to Type Enlightenment. As a Tech Support person I really like this approach because he starts at zero, which everybody does at the beginning, and he is working it out himself and sharing that knowledge with you. I am looking forward to how this site develops.
What are you using now to educate people on fonts and type?
New York Times – Buzzwords of 2008 typography art
January 19th, 2009 by Jim Kidwell
The New York Times isn’t necessarily a newspaper or website that I think of when I think of innovative design. The Times is a paper that typically goes with tried and true respectable designs that lend credibility to their stories (whatever side of the political fence you fall).
That’s why I was surprised to see a feisty use of typography on their website in their recent ‘Buzzwords of 2008‘ story. The story includes images in that display each buzzword, that is filled with colorful imagery. The typeface is consistent throughout, which makes it a bit more grounded. Had they gone with varying typefaces, it would have been even more distracting to the eye.
While this approach definitely isn’t perfect for most stories, I think that this was a great opportunity for them to branch out and try new things on their site.
BTW, anyone know which font was used? I tried to identify it in MyFonts.com’s What the Font, but came up empty handed.
When is it OK to use the Bold and Italic buttons in QuarkXPress?
January 12th, 2009 by Jim Kidwell
You’ve probably been there before. Whether it’s in a classroom, prepress shop or elsewhere, someone has told you that if you use the Bold and Italic buttons in QuarkXPress, fire will rain down from the sky and your document will implode like never before. While this might not necessarily be the case, the truth is a bit more complicated, and has a lot to do whether you’re using QuarkXPress on a Mac or on a PC.
QuarkXPress Product Manager, Dan Logan recently posted some valuable information on the Quark forums about this very topic. And to spread the info to all of you, I’ve included it here.
The problem here is that many people equate the bold & italic buttons to faux transformations in all cases. For example in Kurt Lang’s post he says “In Quark, pressing the Bold, Italic or other styles in the tool bar applies a faked version of the effect to the standard font”. This is not true in all cases. In Scott’s post referenced above he explains how in certain cases you can apply bold or italic via the button and still get an intrinsic instance (“intrinsic” is what we call it when you’re using a font that has the style built-in rather than applying a “faux” transformation to the base font). In fact on Windows you may be required to use the buttons to get the intrinsic font. The difference stems from differences in how the platforms deal with building font menus, which we rely on the OS for since we don’t load the fonts directly.
Also I would say it’s untrue to imply that ALL PostScript RIPs choke on faux bold and italic. Sure, it’s better practice to always use intrinsic fonts, but these days many RIPs and prepress shops can handle those transformations without blowing up. I would argue for intrinsic fonts more as a typographic consideration — faux italics in particular are just plain ugly.
So what is a designer to do? If you’re working on the Mac then we’ll always show all available fonts in the menu (at least the ones the OS tells us are available using the Carbon APIs — this is a different issue). The only exception to this rule is legacy suitcase fonts and dfonts, which may hide intrinsic instances from the menu. So you can’t go wrong by selecting the proper font from the menu; however, in some cases you can also use the key commands and buttons for bold and italic and still get the intrinsic font. On the Mac we’ll only apply a faux transformation if you apply that style and the corresponding font family doesn’t have a bold or italic instance. If you’re unsure then check in Usage > More Information and confirm whether or not the name of the real font file being used is normal or bold/italic. For example, if you’re using the same font all the time and you know it contains intrinsic bold and italic then you’ll probably want to use the keyboard commands to apply them rather than selecting them from the font menu every time.
If you’re on Windows then it’s even trickier because you may have intrinsic styles loaded and they’re not even shown in the font menu. In this case you can still use the Usage dialog to confirm it and then use those fonts with the bold/italic buttons without worrying.
Here at Quark we realize that this is a huge pain and causes a lot of confusion. We are working to solve this problem and make sure that you can more easily tell when you’re using an intrinsic instance of a font rather than a faux transformation, and we want to introduce a mode whereby faux transformations are prohibited entirely (based on customer preference). So help is on the way, I just can’t commit to a timeframe.
So, sounds like the the whole confusing topic might be cleared up in the future. I’d like to cast my vote for adding a preference to always use the intrinsic fonts!
Common typography mistakes
December 5th, 2008 by Jim Kidwell
This is one of those “I should have written that” posts. The fine folks over at The Design Cubicle have put together a list of ten common typography design mistakes to avoid.
This is a great list that you can use to show your clients when they’re asking for something that you just know won’t turn out well. Heck, how many times have you told a client that they can’t put light colored text on a white background?
It’s nice to have an unbiased third party to help settle those sticky questions that pop up in a design review.
Universal Type Server now with CS4 and 64-bit Vista Support
December 4th, 2008 by Cindy Valladares
Today we released an update to Universal Type Server, which adds auto-activation plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator and InDesign CS4 (both Mac and Windows, yeah!). This release also includes 64-bit Windows Vista compatibility for the Universal Type Client.
If you’re a current user, you can take advantage of this added functionality by downloading this free update here.
Universal Type Server is developed using the most modern technology available. This allows us to be very flexible and efficient when delivering updates for our customers.
If you’re not using Universal Type Server yet, give it a try. It’s the only truly cross-platform solution out there that serves the needs of network administrators with a server that runs on Mac or Windows, as well as flexibility for creative users with cross-platform Mac and Windows clients.
Letterpress at Firefly Press in Somerville
December 1st, 2008 by Jim Kidwell
Here’s a quick little news piece on Firefly Press in Somerville, MA. It sounds as if this short documentary was produced as a news special report (the voice-over has that “local tv-news” quality to it). Some really great shots of cool old LinoType presses.
[via IspireMe]
