David Milisock's Blog
https://au.marketo.com/
Never noticed this until a read today.
Marketo is more than just software - when you use it, you get a playbook for digital marketing success.
Not that I'm suggesting Corel should do this. Maybe worth finding a partner that's a "king" in this area.
Alternatives — Always looking for better than Adobe. financesonline.com/.../
I agree, I only use Acrobat Pro 9 anymore and that's because of the Adobe conforming PDF driver and Distiller. I us no Adobe graphics applications any longer and that has been for several years.
I'ts how they have to increase their margins. People aren't seeing the shrinkage, Adobe applications have 2 markets, corporate, that is shrinking and amateur and there they are over priced.
So they try all kinds of crap while they ha very the money to do so. At 3 of my architectural clients just this year, they have reduced their Adobe use, one as much as 60%. Through the virtual office they found they really were over buying.
USE NOTHING Adobe! Take no offers! Do nothing that even remotely generates interest in them. It works for me. I showed examples of no Adobe imaging, all over the world there are examples of no Adobe work that competes with all their product lines
Now we see AUTOMATED BS, learn to be a useless POS!
In my opinion we should watch the action, where Apple and Adobe go wages FALL!
I would say that less than 1% of the market in advertising here use something not Adobe and mostly Macs at that. Corel got the sign industry with "free fonts" early on. That's because signwiters needed many fonts for a few words. Adobe in 1993 were charging $230 for a font set (4). Unaffordable when you needed a font for just a few words.
I doesn't just impact Corel, it impacts all other non Adobe software, no matter how good or what the price point.
Which is why I've been saying that Corel need to be part of some industry marketing to lift the consumer expectation of all products that are not Adobe. It doesn't impact me because I was "educated" by clients that built computers early on. PCs being used for graphics (with or without Adobe) were "saved" by kids that were into PC gaming entering the industry. They were the non Mac influences.
Adobe won't get the professional video market! Those dudes are much more computer/hardware aware. They are used to being brand neutral and many have long histories with Blackmagic Design from the days where BD (an Australian company) sold the little boxes that connected things that were incompatible with each other. That space is shared by a far bigger range of vendors like Sony, JVC, Canon, Red etc. They needed to get the maximum quality from camera to finished product and because of rendering times horsepower and not wankerism was king.
Adobe now rents fonts and limits how many you can use based on what you pay, so many Adobe users can't even send their fonts along with jobs anymore.
One of my clients was maxed out on fonts and had to edit a logo file for my use. She had to uninstall 5 fonts that she was using, restart the application, install 5 fonts restart the application, edit the file and give it to me. Then repeat the process to get back to work. Adobe says this works on the fly, BS! I'm a *** I just make the clients pay to buy the fonts.
In my area advertising is in its death throws. Most are B to B web work you'll see MACS but mostly Adobe on the PC. The dying remnants of agency's are 1 or 2 people MAC shops and there are hundreds of them. They use old MACS many with CS versions of Adobe, most are hoping to make it to retirement with bankruptcy.
NONE are my clients, I expect to be paid promptly.
The Adobe Fonts service (formerly Typekit) no longer has a 100 font limit (they got rid of that limit a couple or so years ago IIRC). A user can sync as many fonts as he likes, although it's probably a good idea not to have more than a couple hundred active at a time. The 100 font limit was not very practical. Some of the type families at Adobe Fonts come close to hitting that 100 font barrier or even going past it.
Regarding commercial font files and what they cost back in the 1990's versus now, it's true high quality commercial typefaces were pretty expensive back then. CorelDRAW was attractive to sign companies primarily because it was made for the Windows platform, which the vast majority of sign companies used. The bundled fonts in CorelDRAW were a nice bonus, once Corel started including good quality fonts. The font collection in the first couple or so versions of CorelDRAW were junky knock-offs. Bitstream made lots of copycat fonts, but they were at least better in quality.
Commercial fonts today are often expensive to buy just like back then. However, one big difference today is newly released type families will be available for big introductory discounts and existing type families occasionally go on sale at various font web sites. Several web sites offer free fonts, but IMHO Google Fonts and Font Squirrel are the only legit ones. The fonts hosted at those two sites are usually decent in quality and 100% free for commercial use.
I use the Adobe Fonts service, but do not rely on it exclusively. I buy a lot of type as well. Just the other day I bought a copy of the Futura Now super family while it was still on sale.
Maybe my client needs to get with the program, her latest update to CC still gives her font issues or at least it did last Wednesday.
The only time I buy a font is if the client forces me to make them buy one. I'd place a few C notes on a bet that I haven't bought a font for myself in a decade. I already have 15,000 or so.
I don't remember the last time I bought a font. I can usually find a free font that is OK for headings.
I, at least personally, appreciate good quality type. It takes an unreal amount of work for one person (or even a team of type designers) to develop a professional quality type family. The competition bar is far higher these days. For a sign designer, it's important to invest in new high quality type families as well as be able to create all kinds of unique, custom lettering.A professional typeface family in the year 2020 has to live up to a standard extremely higher than what existed 20-30 years ago. It's not enough to just cover a basic Latin character set. Today it's common for professional fonts to support Greek and Cyrillic character ranges and have all the diacritic marks for many different languages spanning Europe and the Americas. Then you have to include automatic and discretionary ligatures. Let's add two different number sets (tabular and proportional lining figures), fraction sets and all kinds of symbols. On top of that many font families include true small capitals, which are infinitely superior to ugly stupid fake small capitals where some lame setting just shrinks capital letters.And all that stuff is just related to a normal OpenType character set. Now we have OTF Variable Fonts, which brings back the concepts started with the Type 1 Multiple Master and True Type GX font formats. I mentioned I bought the Futura Now type family. That includes 5 OTF Variable fonts. Those 5 Var font files cover most of the 102 styles in the whole super family, plus countless instances in between. I think the width axis in the primary Futura Now and Futura Now Italic variable font files is really valuable for sign work, especially when they can be combined with the weight and optical size axis sliders. Corel really needs to improve its support of OTF Variable Fonts. The implementation in CorelDRAW 2020 is pretty glitchy.Adding to OTF Variable there's the new OpenType SVG format, which allows for a variety of color fonts and fonts that are either vector or raster-based. Adobe Illustrator not only supports OTF Variable and OTF SVG, but there is a plug in called Font Self for Illustrator and Photoshop that will allow users to create regular OpenType fonts and OTF SVG fonts.
I get designers sending files to clients who then come to me for their sign and other work. The minute they hear they have to continue to use the designer at the designer prices or pay $500 to buy a font that crap flys out the window. I find something close enough and the designer who understands zero about project economics is looking for another client. The only times this rule does not apply is architectural signage, they'll dump the designer and buy the font.
Unfortunately on commercial jobs it's to the point where the sign out lives the business. I've done many jobs wher you could just see up front that the attention paid to the useless was going to cause the business to fail. We don't demand 70% down and a check for the balance the day of install for no reason.
I often dislike customer-provided art files, but usually for many other reasons than a missing font file.
Non-artists doing their own DIY-design work make so many mistakes from the outset. We're talking very basic mistakes, like not understanding simple concepts of math and geometry. The client wants a new sign to go in a horizontal rectangular space yet he cooks up his DIY "design" on a vertical letter sized sheet of paper. It's no wonder why the United States is terribly dependent on H1B Visas for skilled workers to fill engineering jobs, medical jobs and computer science jobs because many of us Americans are really really stupid.
Clients doing their DIY design work do not understand the difference between pixel-based and vector-based artwork. And they don't care to understand. If we reject their JPEG image and ask for something in CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator format they'll send us something like an AI file with the same JPEG image placed inside. Derp!! Many DIY designs are cooked up in cracked copies of Photoshop, made in low resolution. If you're in the US Army you take the junky JPEG image and stick it into a PowerPoint PPT container file.
With the sign industry, we routinely run into double jeopardy here. It's expected the DIY-design crowd will have zero training or expertise in doing graphics work (but they're going to do it anyway because they don't think Graphic Design is an actual profession). The staff at many sign shops is really hardly any better. I don't have any actual numbers on this as proof, but having worked in the sign industry for over 25 years, I would say at least 50% to 75% of all people doing graphics work in the sign industry are self-taught and have no formal training whatsoever. Adding to that, there is a type of anti-intellectualism or even hatred directed at sign industry people (such as me) who actually have a real 4-year BFA degree from a real art school.
The sheer lack of expertise present in both the customers and sign industry staff has led to a great deal of horrible looking sign work. Neon is rapidly disappearing from the scene, making matters worse (neon has a certain charm to it). The result is a growing, civic backlash. More and more municipal governments are passing very restrictive sign ordinances as a means of stomping out the visual clutter. As those severe sign codes spread via city beautification efforts it will end up being very bad for any sign company's bottom line. But we did it to ourselves by happily churning out garbage-quality work.
Missing fonts in an art file is an easy to fix issue. You can manually convert the type to curves/outlines and then send off the art file for production. I do that with 100% of my sign designs once the design is finalized -that way the artwork can be pulled up on any other production computer in my shop without having to mess with installing fonts or even installing software that can properly read the fonts (not many apps can read OTF Variable or OpenType-SVG fonts). Fonts can be embedded in PDFs. The Flatten Transparency function in Adobe Illustrator has a setting that will convert embedded fonts in a placed PDF to curves, that way you don't need to install a font to be able to edit the artwork. AFAIK CorelDRAW does not have an equivalent function.
I'm not aware of any single font files that cost $500 a piece. I had to spend $70 on a weight of Stone Sans for a Farmer's Insurance job recently. A OTF Variable font can cost $300-$400 a pop, but the VAR font contains a whole type family inside one file. Our sign company has to deal with all kinds of cost of business issues, but software and fonts are pretty minor compared to the cost of buying a new crane truck, a new 5' X 10' computer routing table or providing health insurance coverage.
I can tell you that paying for trucks or cutters can't be passed along to one client. However a designer can easily design, through self importance use so many variations of a font that you have to spend $500 or more. Most successful small business won't pay for that, I know I won't.
In my experiance designers add so much cost to a project that in most cases it negates their involvement. For about 25 years there was a group of artisans and project managers who had made a list of local designers who they refused to work with.
Who was the designer and did they have any control over the project was always my first questions. I made quite a bit of money on projects I first refused because of the designer then I came back into fix projects after they trashed the designer.