If a Font Manager is doing it's job you'll forget it's there

I recently changed to a new font manager. Normally this would not be a big issue, but I am writing about it for two reasons.

1. The font manager I was using I have used for many years and always loved. I will refer to it as Font Manager A (I really don't want to name names since I am speaking badly of it).
2. The new font manager was unknown to me, I had never heard of it. Not only do I like the way it works much, much better, but the support staff was really great.

I wanted to write about it is because it works a little different than the Font Manager I was using, which is also the font manager that most people I know use also. I am so pleased with the new one I wanted to explain why.

The Problem:

I have been a Font Manager A user for many years. Recently I upgraded my MacBookPro's operating system to SnowLeopard. A couple of days after that I saw that Font Manager A had a SnowLeopard patch. I installed it and after that when I tried to save a file in InDesign, it not only crashed, but it corrupted the file. This happened three times, you can imagine how frustrating that was.

So I twittered about the problem I was having and got a response from someone that said they used FontAgent. I had heard of Font Manager A, and the Font Manager that had merged with it, Mac's Font Book, and even a free font manager called Font Xplorer, but I had never even heard of Font Agent.

So let me explain some of the differences and some of the cool things.

First I noticed that I could not activate a font temporarily. I could go into the preferences and set it so that any manually activated fonts would open after a restart, but on second thought I didn't want that. Here's why. I have 20 fonts that I want on all the time. When I am designing a logo I manually turn on 50 fonts. If I set it to activate manually activated fonts after a restart all 70 fonts would come on. The way around this is to leave it set so that manually activated fonts turn off after a restart (which is the default), and make what is called a start up set. I made a new set, then right clicked and selected Start up set. Then I dragged my 20 fonts I want open all the time into the set and Font Agent activates those 20 fonts every time I restart. The 50 fonts, I opened for a logo project, get turned off on a restart. It's a different way of thinking about it, but it achieves the same result.

It seems that when I open an Illustrator or InDesign file Font Manager A activated the fonts the files needed and they were all there when the file was drawn to screen. Font Agent activates all my fonts also, but it seems like it does it a little later in the file opening process. I see a window about missing fonts, click okay, the missing font window closes and I see the activating fonts messages. This is so far the biggest problem I have had, and it doesn't really bother me.

On a side note, Font Manager A would deactivate a font of mine all the time after a restart, even though I had it set to be permanently activated. I have not had this problem since I put the same font in a start up group.

The next thing I noticed is Font Agent activates fonts in Illustrator, InDesign, Quark and Photoshop. Font Manager A didn't activate for Photoshop.

It also activates fonts for Safari and Mail. Now this may not seem like a big thing, most web designers use only web safe fonts and all computers have those. But much to my surprise as I surf the web or scroll through email I see Font Agent messages about fonts being activated, (this can be turned off) non-standard, non-websafe fonts. After I saw that I started to pay attention to webpages and they looked different, they looked the way the were meant to, non standard. I was really surprised by this. I think you can put programs into the preferences in Font Manager A to have it activate fonts for other programs, but I had never done that, I never knew I could until I started to write this.

Font Agent's font menu can be set to WYSIWYG so you can see your font names in the font style. I think Font Manager A can do this, but is was really slow on my machine.

Font Agents tools for classifying fonts seems much more comprehensive and the search tools seem to work a little better. Now maybe I will finally get my fonts organized, but just in case I don't Font Agent has something called the Font Player. It allows you to select a group of fonts and quickly automatically scroll through them. I could manually scroll through my fonts with Font Manager A (I can with Font Agent also) but every once in a while it would crash and the font would get marked as a bad font. So far with Font Agent I have not had it lock up and mark any fonts as bad. As I understand it Font Agent does a better job of fixing, and excluding bad fonts during the adding fonts process.

When I dragged all my fonts into Font Manager A I had 9874 fonts. When I dragged them into Font Agent I had 10381.

Both Font Manger A and Font Agent let you make smart sets, set attributes about fonts, make multiple sets, store your fonts in one folder, organize your font folder, and collect for output.

It may not seem like a big deal, but then it shouldn't be. If I am having to think about managing fonts, my Font Manager isn't doing it's job. I hope you check it out, FontAgent.

Sharing what you do to develop working relationships

Lets face it, as a designer many people think what we do is magic based on a mood or whim. The challenge is to develop relationships and show people there are reasons we do the things we do. Developing a good relationships is a lot of work, but well worth it.

Here are some things I have done in my career to foster good relationships, help build the brand and explain what I do.

Talk: When I worked for a larger company I would walk around every morning and talk to people. See how it was going, what they were working on and offer to help where I could. This is hard because as an In House Designer I had a full schedule, but I thought it was important. Another advantage is sometimes I could see things coming that I needed to get ready for and spot possible problems, like brand issues. I'd like nothing more than to crawl into my cubicle, put my IPod on and zone out, but sometimes grabbing a cup of coffee and heading down the cubicle rows can be rewarding.

Cheer Lead: I'd love to claim this idea as mine but it was our HR managers. We got an old monitor and computer and put it up in the main hall. I sent emails out asking what people were doing outside work. I got hobbies, baby and wedding announcements and garage sales, etc. I also asked for sales info and new deals the sales team was working on. I used a looping powerpoint show, if I had an old Mac I would have used Keynote. It played on the monitor all day and people would stop and check it out. I also did slides about using the right logo and font, and I made sure the presentation fit the company brand. This gave me contact with all the other departments and helped reinforce the brand.

Push Info: A weekly newsletter is another fun way to get info out and have a reason to make contact with other departments. In one issue I did a story about the new fountain in front of the building that looked like a satellite dish. I retouched a photo of aliens by the fountain and said they were putting a communications device in front of the building. People loved it and would stop by and ask how I did it. It was fun, got people to talk to me and gave me the opportunity to show a little of my photoshop skills.

Communicate: When ever possible tell people what you're doing and if you can, show some science behind it. Color psychology, why you wanted an image facing a certain direction to pull the readers eye in that direction. Share articles about why a strong brand is so important. Make them understand what you do is not just your whim. Show them the method behind your madness.

Pro-Bono: Help someone with a garage sale flyer, or side business, you might even get a freelance customer out of it. I did a logo for a fellow employee that was starting an online storage business. In trade he gave me some storage space, but the people that came by and commented about how they liked the logo, and gave me an opportunity to share why I did it was the real benefit.

Be sure to check with your boss to make sure they are okay with all of these, You don't want them feeling like you're undermining them or being distracted from your job. As crappy as it is, designers have to deal with the reality of office politics all to often.

An interesting post in the Pushing Rock Blog on this topic.

Have fun making new friends and explaining your skills.

Tracking Twitter

I must admit, when I first heard of Twitter my initial reaction was, What, 140 characters, micro blogging, how stupid is that. Well that was a about three months, 350 tweets, and 110 followers ago, now I'm hooked, and with anywhere between 2.5 million to 10 million accounts worldwide, (Twitter is keeping this under their hat), you can't afford to ignore Twitter.

Twitter Takes Time

I will be first to admit that twitter has the potential to suck the life out of my morning schedule. Marketing is about the numbers, knowing the effect my message is having, or at least how many people it's getting to is the only way to know if the time I'm spending is worth the effort. So if I am going to give some of my already busy schedule to Twittering I need to be able to see what happens to my tweets.

Google Analytics

I am a designer, not an SEO expert, so I am just going to relay, in the simplest terms, what I have done to be able check my twittering. For a really detailed approach to measuring your tweets check out this blog post by Hendrylee.

The first step is what do you want to measure? You may have a specific goal, driving traffic to your website of blog. You can track clicks from twitter but your going to have to have something like Google Analytics to measure what happens on your site or blog. Here are some links to help you add Google Analytics to your varies web assets.

Google Analytics
Add Google Analytics to your Blogger blog.
WordPress plugin for Google Analytics

Another reason to add Google Analytics to your assets is because you can take your Twitter feed and add it to your blog or website. If people click through a Twitter link from your blog or website you would have no way to track that.

Twitter Tools

There are a lot of ways to send and follow your twitters. I have tried a few and like a couple of them a lot. I have to admit The one I like the most is not the one I use. I like TweatDeck and Seesmic. They look great, work well, save searches, group people you follow, run multiple accounts, and they are AdobeAir programs so they run on any computer platform. The draw back is they have no tools to measure Twitter click throughs. There is a way to measure your clicks though, it's called Bit.Ly. You have to sign up for a Bit.ly account and be sure to use Bit.y to shorten your links in your tweets. This means re-shrinking links in the tweets you re-transmit, if you want to track those. That is extra work, but how serious do you want to be about tracking click throughs? There is a good discussion called, A Simple Way to Measure Twitter Effectiveness, about how Bit.Ly works on the Meteor Blog.

I use a program called HootSuite to monitor Twitter. It does much of what TweatDeck and Seesmic does, but it has statistics about your tweets when you use Ow.Ly, the URL shortener in HootSuite. You still have to re-shorten the links you re-transmit, but that's the cost of knowing. It also lets you schedule when your tweets post so they go out when your followers are online. The thing I don't like about it is it's web-based. I like to keep my Twitter Dashboard, as TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite are called, open all the time, this is difficult in a web browser. The way I get around this is to use a program called Fluid. Fluid is a web browser that uses very little system resources and lets you close all of the navigation and menus so it looks like an application. Unfortunately for some, it is a Mac application.

Other Statistics

Tweet Stats lets you see statistics about what and when you are twittering.
See how your followers are growing on Twitter Counter.
The following sites have some Statistics about Twitter:
ComScore
Twitter statistics that make you go "hmmmm"

So good luck and good tracking. Remember, knowledge is power.

Crowdsourcing – Is it another way to devalue creativity?

What is crowdsourcing?
You can’t hear the word crowdsourcing without thinking of outsourcing which has become the word for shipping jobs overseas. Crowdsourcing has become the term used to describe using as many people as possible to get things done as cheap as you can.

The word crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing, by Jeff Howe. But the act of crowdsourcing has been around for longer than that.

Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

My opinion on crowdsourcing?
In my opinion, crowdsourcing is to the creative industry, e.g. Graphic Design, Photography, what Wal-Mart is to small businesses and customer service.

If you’re a Wal-Mart shopper you might think great, crowdsourcing is going to make Graphic Designers more affordable right? If you don’t care for the big box stores you might wonder if the customer service you have come to love from your graphic designer is going away? The answer to both those questions may be yes.

The pros and cons of crowdsourcing are in the eye of the beholder. If your Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia means less sales, but need to know some information quickly on your phone, or you know something and want to share it easily, it’s great. Istock photo is bad for professional photographers, but great to small businesses with a tiny budget. If you’re a designer the big logo design sites take away your logo work, but need a quick cheap logo and they’re great.

As prices are forced lower by crowdsourcing designers have to spend less time on each task to make the same amount of money. The time it takes to design and build a file won’t change much; so personal contact with the customer is what will suffer.

So how does crowdsourcing affect design?
When I design a logo I talk to my clients, I ask questions to get to know them, the personality of their company or product, and learn whom their target audience is. I consider where the client is in their market, leader or just entering. I consider color psychology and the nature of shapes. When you go to a logo box store site the main question you’re asked is how much do you want to pay? As a designer for big box logo site you have to churn out logos like a machine to make any money. You create a bike shop logo with a bicycle rim in the middle and the next week you swap out the bike rim for a car tire and present it to the next client. I am not saying these are bad designers, on the contrary, I have seen some great logos come out of these shops. However with little to no interaction with the client they are just creating good-looking logos, not necessarily the right logo for your company or product.

What happens from prolonged exposure to this level of design, it becomes normal; just like the lack of customer service and personal attention we have come expect from a big box store. So while crowdsourcing is a great way to get design work done cheap, it may not be a way to get great design work.

Some examples of when crowdsourcing works:
Crowdsourcing News: The Guardian and MP expenses investigation into the MP Expense Scandal in the UK. The newspaper created a system to allow the public to search methodically through 700,000 expense claim documents. Over 20,000 people participated in finding erroneous and remarkable expense claims by Members of Parliament.

Timeline: Steve Fossett disappearance. The search for aviator Steve Fossett, whose plane went missing in Nevada in 2007, in which up to 50,000 people examined high-resolution satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe that was made available via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The search was ultimately unsuccessful. Fosset's remains were eventually located by more traditional means.

The ESP Game by Luis von Ahn (later acquired by Google and renamed Google Image Labeler) was launched in 2004 and gets people to label images as a side-effect of playing a game. The image labels can be used to improve image search on the Web. This game led to the concept of Games with a purpose.

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

Other things writen about crowdsourcing:
Phantom Captain:
 Art and Crowdsourcing
, by Andrea Grover
The Rise of Crowdsourcing, by Jeff Howe
Is Crowdsourcing Evil? The Design Community Weighs In, by Jeff Howe

What's in a name change.

I was listening to the radio and heard a story on the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and how they're thinking of changing the name of the state to Rhode Island. Yes the full name of Rhode Island is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. It made me think about company names and changing them.

I have developed a strong brand and, I think, a rather unique and recognizable, though sometimes difficult to use, logo.


Now that I have developed a brand I find that sometimes I need a simpler logo and name. I use YAD, Your Art Director's acronym, and a YAD button.


Now I don't have the resources, or brand recognition, to change my company name like International Business Machines, IBM, did and because YAD* has another meaning, I make sure that when I use YAD it is always in conjunction with Your Art Director in some way.

In these days of texting and twittering LOL, RT and @, 2 ur friends, when is it right to make the switch from your full name to a shortened name or acronym?

Some things to ask yourself before you make a switch.

• Do I have a strong brand, would I be giving up brand equity to make a switch?
  
• Do people have an emotional attachment to my companies brand?
  
• Is anyone using the new name or acronym already?
  
• Is there a problem with the new name, it's acronym or URL?
  
• Does my new name work internationally?
  
• Why do I need to change the name?
  

A strong brand - Kleenex® and Band-Aid® wouldn't think of changing their names, they have actually had to sue people to not use their name. An interesting article about just that: American Red Cross Sued For Using a Red Cross

An emotional attachment to the brand - McDonalds® and the Golden Arches® have many childhood memories attached to them for a lot of people, using Mickey D's may be okay in more playful marketing targeting younger customers, but the loss of an emotional attachment to your customers could prove devastating.

Is the name or acronym already used - In many cases people base their company name on the availability of a URL. I think you should choose the best name for your company then figure out the URL. That said, be sure the URL that matches your company name isn't being used by your competition, or something worse. An article on acronym problems in the Credit Uunion industry

Is the new name a problem - It's easy to think that the company American Sprinkler Systems (I made this up, not affiliated with American Sprinkler) could use it's acronym, but it might not be in their best interest. Sharing expert information online is a great idea, so who wouldn't like the Experts Exchange, well some spam blockers might not, expertsexchange.com. The top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs

The new name internationally - When General Motors introduced the Chevy Nova in South America they didn't know that "no va" meant "it won't go." After the company figured out why it wasn't selling any cars, it renamed the car in its Spanish markets to the Caribe. This is a horrible website, but it has some fun international marketing mistakes, well, I'm sure they weren't fun for the marketing professionals in charge.

Why change the name - Changing a name and logo is the quickest way for a marketing profession to put their mark on a company, but is it the best thing for the company or just their portfolio? There needs to be a good compelling argument to make a big change to your brand. Sometimes through no fault of it's own a company finds it's name has become a bad thing. You wouldn't blame a company with 911 in it's name for feeling like it needed a change. Sometimes a company outgrows it's name. Apple Computer® changed it's name to Apple® after the rise of the Ipod.

What can you gain from making a brand and name change? In many case's a lot but whatever you decide to do, be sure to build some matrix to measure the effect the brand change is having.

Some more information on naming companies.

Entrepreneur.com's naming rsources
Why Companies Change Their Name, Name Wire
The 10 Commandments of a Great Business Name, About.com

As for Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in my opinion, changing the name is a waste of time and money. No one refers to it as Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, I've only ever heard it refered to as Rhode Island, they also have the distinction of having the longest state name and it's going to cost a lot of money to change all the documents and signs.


*A YAD (Hebrew: יד‎), literally, "hand," is a Jewish ritual pointer, used to point to the text during the Torah reading from the parchment Torah scrolls. It is intended to prevent anyone from touching the parchment, which is considered sacred.