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.
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 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.
The scenario you describe of a designer throwing in all kinds of font variations that end up costing the client hundreds of dollars in font purchases is really an extreme sounding example that just doesn't exist, at least not in the sign industry.
If I design a logo or other graphics materials for a local business or even a large company the logo files absolutely never have any active font objects in them. It's all converted to curves. If they need the graphics elements printed on menus, t-shirts, etc whoever is doing that work never ever has to buy any fonts to get the job done. Perhaps some other designers might be different, but I don't go nuts putting a ransom note's worth of fonts in my designs, even when I'm using unique commercial fonts. In the rare case a client needs to write out a bunch of verbiage in a specific typeface compatible with a logo I designed they do have the option to buy single weights of a typeface. That costs a lot less than $500. Normally they don't even do that work themselves. They job it out to other companies. A line item bill for $50 here or $100 there for a couple font files is really not a big deal. The Farmers Insurance agent we worked with recently didn't bat an eyelash at the small fee to buy one weight of Stone Sans. Plus it's a purchase we won't have to do again on follow-up work with any Farmers Insurance agents (at least not until they change their branding scheme).
In the instances where I receive CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator files with active fonts I don't have, I just let them know they need to send another copy with all the text converted to outlines. Very easy to do.
The reality within the sign industry is an extreme in the opposite direction. So many "sign companies" and "sign designers" use Arial on Everything. Squeeze and stretch default Arial to fit any given space. And don't leave any white space either. Utter absolute visual crap. That IS the sign industry today. Default fonts. Trash standards and practices. We are literally asking city councils to put our incompetent @$$ses out of business via Draconian-level anti-signs sign codes.
I'm a big type fan and font nerd, so I do actively invest in good quality commercial typefaces, usually when they're first released at a big discount. So many of my competitors vomit out Arial and a few other outdated, over-used, stale typefaces that it's not difficult to make our products just completely outclass their output. We win more large clients because we bother to respect branding standards and won't let a local franchisee deviate from them. We try our best to be professional.
David Milisock said:In my experiance designers add so much cost to a project that in most cases it negates their involvement.
Good designers are interpreters of clients needs. This is a real dickhead thing to say in a forum full of people that are involved in design and production. Goes with claiming you are a photographer cause you have a camera.
Hope someone like Mosh notices this and kicks your ***, you deserve it. It's not about the cost added, it's about the ROI.
Listen I report what I experiance, I've never worked on any project let alone a large scale project ($20,00) and up where the designer didn't drive up costs, many times hugely.
I work with hundreds of designers in the architectural industry. Fortunately even they know the problem, they simply accept that they only make a conceptual drawing. Someone else really does the work. It's demonstrated in the software they use, 1 CAD system to 4 conceptual 3D systems.
Get real, I never get a simple booklet file that works from a designer. I just got a simple 4 page invitation that took 4 hours to fix the 65 images. What the hell was the designer doing?
Look at the files we see here! One of the single largest failures of graphic software is that we never achieved the efficiency we were promised when it was introduced. Most jobs actually have a minimum of 50%+ increase in man hours. Even silly jobs have to be almost completely reworked, imagine what takes place when it's 500 signs spread around a15 acre facility.
So the cost is many times inflated because of ego and or incompetence.
One of my favorite examples is a designer demand for translucent, frosted, reflective building identification signs. I told the project managers that I could do it but the reflective properties would last 2 years at best and triple the cost. It lasted about 30 months and the client noticed the reflective material failed. I was obliged to show them the communication trail, the demand by the designer and the signature of the manager authorizing the added expenditure. An $84,500 sign budget got blown out to $178,000. Of course by now both the manager and designer were long gone, fired by the board.
I'm really struggling with what the hell kinds of "sign projects" you're even talking about. And just exactly how does the choice of a particular typeface drive up the costs? I can see the choice of materials, type of sign, whether the sign is illuminated or not affecting the costs in a big way. Fonts? Um, no.
I've worked on some large way-finding sign projects for hospitals and college campuses. Everything in such a contract needs to develop in a certain order. The very first, BASIC steps are developing a sign bible of standards that will be followed to a sternly militant directive. That often gets done in the bidding stage before anything is actually sold. You get all of the "design by committee" BS filtered out BEFORE you even finalize the sign system bible. The choice of typeface isn't going to do squat to affect the system, unless the people choosing the type family make some ridiculously stupid, block-headed choices. Usually the block-headed choices come from people who are NOT designers. "Can we set all the way-finding messages in Brush Script? I really like Brush Script!"
Regarding speed and efficiency, graphic design software has never had the built-in ability to provide that. The only thing graphics applications provide is a way to produce graphics work with greater precision. Speed and efficiency comes only from skilled users who use the applications effectively AND organize their projects effectively. But the graphic designers can do only so much. When you have doofus clients making all kinds of nuisance changes and requests at all stages of a project it really slows everything down big time. Or they send everything backwards in a tailspin. I really hate how Hollywood movies portray computer use. A character just rattles some gibberish into a keyboard and dramatically pumps out on screen what in fact took a team of artists many hours to churn out behind the scenes.
Regarding this Strawman Designer specifying frosted whatever that doesn't last long, that also sounds like baloney. And it's hard for me not to take personal offense at it. The fact is 99.9% of the time THE CLIENTS are the ones demanding stupid choices of materials to be used that will not last out in the weather. Any sign designer with more than a couple or so years of experience learns pretty fast what works and what does not work for outdoor use versus indoor use. Any newbie designer in a credible sign company will have higher ups to check him on bad choices before it even gets to the client. This notion of blaming graphic designers in a sign company as scapegoats for the trials and tribulations of a sign system project really doesn't go over well with me at all. It makes me pretty angry. Nearly 100% of the time it's the NOT-DESIGNERS who do not think visually and who often don't even understand basic geometry that create most of the problems in a large unit, way-finding sign project.