Thursday, October 20, 2011

Extensis Releases FREE Plug-in for Designing with Web Fonts in Photoshop

Designing with web fonts in their offline workflow has been a stumbling block for web designers around the globe. Today, Extensis, a leading provider of font management solutions, is ending this conundrum with the release of their new Web Font Plug-in. Designed to work inside Adobe Photoshop, Extensis' Web Font Plug-in provides web designers with free access to thousands of WebINK fonts, sourced from world-renowned foundries, for use in their web designs.

For the vast majority of web designers, the creative process begins on the desktop in Adobe Photoshop, where designers create their initial mock-ups, and then quickly moves to the web for final production.

"Since most fonts are licensed based on where they will be used--on the desktop or on the web--their traditional workflow requires that designers own two separate licenses for the same font to be license compliant," says Thomas Phinney, Extensis' Senior Product Manager for Fonts and Typography. "Our Web Font Plug-in frees web designers from needing to license desktop fonts to do mockups of their web site designs."

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

a book about fonts

Who'd have guessed that a book about proper punctuation would surge onto the best-seller lists? But in 2003, Lynne Truss pulled off that trick with "Eats, Shoots & Leaves."

Now comes fellow Briton Simon Garfield to try the same trick with "Just My Type," a book about typefaces — their history, popularity and characteristics. Like Truss, Garfield uses snappy writing and snarky humor. And now that computer printers dwell in most American households, most Americans get involved in typefaces, if only by choosing Times New Roman for their Word documents.