Posts Tagged ‘Online font creator’

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Font Management Apps: Suitcase Fusion 4

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

We know designers who preoccupy about fonts the same way others consume over old vinyl records. Frequently reorganizing their collections, searching through their back catalogue and adding new acquisitions. OS X’s font management tools are simply insufficient for the task.

Suitcase Fusion is the implement of option. In version 4 there’s a new UI designed to shorten the round-trip between font manager and the countless applications designers’ use, so it’s an important upgrade.

Category                    : Utilities
Developer                  : Extensis
Compatibility             : Mac OS X v10.5.8 or later
Age Rating                 : 4+
Price                          : US$131 (Full); US$65.50 (Upgrade)

Top of the new element list is combination with Adobe Creative Suite. Designers can preview organize and activate fonts straight within Photoshop, Illustrator and In Design. Working on a design project in CS? Download the new font, see how it looks and install it lacking leaving the document window.

The feature supports CS tools from version 3 through to 5.5 – with support for CS6 set to come as a free improve just as soon as Extensis have bashed away the bugs. Quark users aren’t left in the cold also, with plug-in sustain for Quark Xpress 7, 8 and 9.

Adobe’s print workflow tool In Copy is catered for too, with the built in creation plug-in updated to make new fonts instantly accessible.

Suitcase Fusion’s best known for its association tools and these have had a muscular boost. Font favorites let you pick star fonts from your collection, so your fallback faces are always easily available. You can also generate and curate your own custom font lists, for collections of typefaces that fit a job or thesis.

And talking about picking fonts for the job, the preview window enables you to see fonts with your choice of text – headline, logo, and strap – anything you need. Take it a step added and you can even try fonts out with the built in colour picker, with a bespoke background.

One of our own favorite features is Google web Font combination. This online collection of free faces is designed for use in web pages, but includes many fonts that are just as suitable to print and digital publishing projects; there are hundreds to choose from. This element increases web font support introduced formerly through webink.

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Arabic Typeface Catches the Think of designers

Monday, March 26th, 2012

Efforts being complete to reaffirm Arab identity at corporate level Dubai: There isn’t enough Arabic typefaces, said typographer Tarek Atrissi. It wasn’t so much an inspection as it was a declaration. One that obviously shouts out there is high demand for Arabic fonts, less supply.

Type designers Tarek Attrisi and Nadine Chahine speak about The Modern Arabic typeface in a workshop with students at the Tashkeel, Nad Al Sheba, and Dubai.

This fact is without help encouraging type designers and graphic design students in the Middle East to do something about it. That something was clear from Atrissi’s current workshop titled Arabesque, Identity and Arabic Typography, organized by Nuqat Design Conference 2012, where students were sketching forms of Arabic lettering.

There is an explosion in branding. For exclusive branding – whether it is signage or a logo – you need an exclusive typographic voice. Companies are pointed for unique typefaces. Companies are trying to repeat the Arab identity on a corporate level.

The co-host of the workshop, type designer Nadine Chahine, added: “Companies in the Gulf have extra budgets for branding. Given that typeface is an essential ingredient, there is new interest in Arabic type. Now some of these students at the workshop may be able to expand the letters they have sketched keen on a system and further extend it into a font.”

Chahine works at Linotype, Germany, a global contributor of superior quality typographic products and services. She has more than 18 fonts to her glory with the best-selling Frutiger Arabic and Koufiya.

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Copying Leads To Competition, Competition Leads To Innovation

Monday, March 12th, 2012

Marco Arment, the creator of the popular read-it-later tool Instapaper, has an excellent blog post discussing copying, innovation, and the best ways to react to competition. Arment discusses a new Instapaper competitor called Readability, which launched last week and received a lot of praise for including custom fonts, something Instapaper lacks:

I could have interpreted this defensively and complacently: “Georgia and Verdana are great, versatile, highly screen-readable fonts! I don’t need to do what competitors do! Newer isn’t always better! My crusty old fonts have some technical advantage that you don’t care about!” And so on. That would have just made me look stubborn and out of touch, failing to understand (in fact, trying very hard not to understand) why newer fonts could be attractive to customers, and failing to admit that I should have done it first.

Instead, I’m taking this misstep as a wake-up call: I missed an important opportunity that’s necessary for the long-term competitiveness of my product. So I’ve spent most of the last week testing tons of reading fonts, getting feedback from designers I respect, narrowing it down to a handful of great choices, and negotiating with their foundries for inclusion into the next version of Instapaper. And the results in testing so far are awesome. I wish someone had kicked my complacent ass about fonts sooner. Reacting well to competition requires critical analysis of your own product and its shortcomings, and a complete, open-minded understanding of why people might choose your competitors.

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First Appear: Apple’s new third-generation iPad with Retina display

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

The box and packaging for the new iPad is largely the same as its predecessor. In fact, the biggest change is a silver iCloud logo on the bottom of the box, opposite the silver Apple logo displayed on the other side.

Opening the box of a new 32-gigabyte Wi-Fi model, it’s all iPad, with the plastic-covered device sitting atop the included instructions, USB cable and wall charging adapter. Holding down the power button boots the device with a quick and showy flash of the Apple logo before the PC-free setup begins.

Even in the setup process, the improved clarity with the new Retina display is apparent. Text and fonts are much sharper, and this can immediately be noticed even during the iCloud restore. Another new addition that will appear during the setup process is the “Dictation” feature. Here, users are informed of how it works, and are allowed to enable or disable the feature.

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