I’ve been supporting print designers using Macs since the days of System 8, well over 10 years, and font management has always been the most frequent problem I’ve been asked to resolve. For years we’ve fought the battles of missing fonts, corruption, truetype failures, and just plain too many fonts on the system. Load too many fonts (some 2,000 postscript fonts here at Creative Services), and your system will begin to drag. Even worse, when you tried to find a font in Quark or InDesign, you had to scroll through the hundreds of fonts in your list. So we have always used the best font management tools available so that we could easily load and unload our thousands of fonts.

Back in the day of OS 8, Adobe Type Manager was required, and it was and remained a dog. We loaded and unloaded fonts manually, that is, we put them in the system font folder, rebooted, and then reversed the process once done using them. It was easy to miss something, and often designers would just keep activating fonts without ever removing any, and this would clog their system performance.

When Apple moved to OS X, the problems multiplied, as there were now 4 different font folders, and Murphy’s Law set in. Font Book, which comes with OS X, works, sort of, but it is not a professional level tool. Font management programs have several advantages, including previews of your font collection, folder organization and activation, automatic loading and unloading of fonts, and resolution of duplicates.

We used two of the leading products, Suitcase and FontAgent Pro, but when it came time to upgrade a couple of years ago, I looked around once again, and to my surprise found the best of the lot was the new Font Explorer X from Linotype, and it was free! When I first opened it, I thought I had opened ITunes by mistake; the interface is very similar, including a Linotype store where you can buy and download fonts.

Linotype is one of the oldest European font houses, with many famous font designers including Hermann Zapf, Adrian Frutiger, and Akira Kobayashi. I could understand that they could make such a great product and give it away (Suitcase/FontAgent are $100), as they were able to get you to their store. The prices are the same as Adobe, but much easier to preview and buy. Besides, many of the fonts we use are Linotype originals, and licensed by Adobe for sale.

Font Explorer X is still the best tool, IMHO, and there are two commercial versions available, workstation and server. However Linotype still offer Version 1.2.3 which is a free download available at http://www.fontexplorerx.com/download/, and at that price, it’s the best deal out there. Snow Leopard is said to improve font management within the OS, with unlimited fonts allowed (without system degradation) and auto-activation, two major steps in the right direction. In fact, if things go right, we may not have to buy any font management software in the future, Font Explorer X Version 1.2.3 will bridge our needs till after upgrade to Snow Leopard.

Here is a link to a review of font management tools written last fall, (I think it is still valid):
Font Manager Review

Today I feel like a pesky intern. I have been wandering around looking for work to do, but no one seems to have any for me. During my search I even wandered into an important meeting which I was promptly thrown out of. Incidentally, I have also been thrown out of my own office because my office mate is conducting a phone interview.

So I gave up on the search for work, got some orange chicken from Panda Express, and I have settled into a co-worker’s office for a nice, long blog post about life, love, the meaning of the universe, editing, and the summer. (But mostly the last two.)

I’ve noticed something since I started working here as a writer and editor. Even when I’m not at work, I now have the urge to edit everything. I am officially the person who everyone hates because I am always pointing out mistakes on signs and brochures and being really snotty and condescending about it (despite the fact that I, myself, absolutely depend on Microsoft Word’s automatic spell check). But I come across about 50 things each day I want to edit. From Facebook statuses to restaurant menus to the student newspaper (which got my last name and major wrong in my last of 60 columns) to the fortune cookie I got the other day telling me “it is time to moving forward.” I just want to fix the world’s mistakes.

And speaking of moving forward, this is totally unrelated but I am excited to continue working here as we move on into summer. Summertime in Bloomington is wonderful with most of the students gone, and it will be nice to have a reason to be in town every day. I am also excited for summer because I just opened my fortune cookie from my lunch and it says “You will have full contentment by summers end.” So achieving full contentment is definitely something to be excited about.

(Although there should really be an apostrophe before the “s” in “summers.”)

After a circulation of about 549 e-mails were sent among the writers and editors trying to find a day and time that we could all have lunch together, we went ahead and made a reservation for 12 people at the Dunn Inn for Monday at 12:15. “And good thing we did,” I thought as we entered the restaurant that was completely devoid of afternoon customers except for the 12 of us.

The Dunn Inn turned out to be a very friendly place. When our food came out, the waiter sang out our orders as he placed them in front of us. I ordered a salad along with a few others, and everyone else’s food came out before ours. “The salads will be out soon, we’re just waiting on a cucumber!” the waiter said to us. (Sang to us, rather). About a minute later a cook emerged from the back and scurried through the restaurant and out the front door.  About ten seconds later, he returned—a cucumber in hand. (How this cucumber managed to materialize in so short a time span, the world may never know). When my salad came out it was enormous, and I made the obligatory remarks: “This is so big! I’ll never finish! It’s bigger than my head!” But of course I downed it in minutes flat, as I always do. It happened to be the birthday of one of our writer/editors, so we all sang Happy Birthday to her. When we finished, the cucumber cook from the kitchen ran out to us, grinning. “It’s my birthday, too!’ he exclaimed and we all started applauding.

Also this week we hosted our first ever intern fair for new interns for the summer and fall, and I got to talk to the aspiring writers/editors who will one day replace me. *tear*
The internship fair was a big success with an impressive turnout, but if we had to do it all over again I would suggest that we not serve cupcakes. They are awkward to eat in front of people you are trying to impress.

I wasn’t even particularly trying to impress anyone, and yet I became so self-conscious sloppily eating my cupcake with the thick layer of chocolate frosting that I momentarily considered hiding out in the bathroom to finish eating it, but then I remembered the scene from Mean Girls where Lindsay Lohan has to eat her lunch alone in the bathroom because she has no friends, and I decided to try not to be that pathetic. (Instead I regretfully threw away my half-eaten cupcake).

Working at the Office of Creative Services has definitely been a learning experience. I had to stretch to think of eight new and creative ways to describe lists of honors and awards for the Founder’s Day Teaching Awards book; write my first blog ever; and be more e-mail-savvy than I’ve ever been before (is ending with “sincerely” too outdated?). But I think the hardest, and best, thing I’m learning here is how to manage my time.

My time management skills have always been nonexistent. My excuse is that I “work best under pressure,” but in reality, I can’t work on papers or projects until the last minute because I have so many other things I’ve procrastinated on that need to be taken care of. Despite my terrible habit, my work has always been finished and I’ve earned good grades.

Working at OCS is forcing me to learn and practice time management skills. Everything we do at OCS has to be tracked on this program called the Infowit Job Tracking System. Editing proofs, writing profiles, and writing blogs—all are tracked and billed to clients or recorded as overhead through this software. The ability to see who is paying me for each hour of my time has been a nice incentive to stay on task.

If only our professors would track our work and pay us accordingly, I know I would be a more dedicated student. I can see the project names in Infowit now: “IUB Psychology 101, Read pages 72-120”—or “IUB SOJ 917 Communication Law Review, Write/Edit.” My apartment might even get cleaned once in a while if I could bill someone for my time.

But even though I’m not getting paid, I am trying to apply the concept of job tracking to my schoolwork. Lately, I’ve tried breaking projects down into a few hours every night. For an annotated bibliography that was due two weeks ago, I allocated three hours each night to work on it. However, change is coming slowly: the three hours were 11 p.m. to 2 a.m.—after I took a nap, ate dinner, and caught up with Facebook and Perez Hilton.

A holiday weekend would have been the best time to apply this new method, but I didn’t take advantage of it. Hunting for Easter eggs with my 4-year-old brother trumped research papers and I didn’t get anything done. Consequently, I was at the library until at least 6 a.m. Monday and Tuesday. But like I said, I do my best work under pressure.

On the Web today, it doesn’t take much to leave a bad impression on a user. However, awareness of a few common usability pitfalls can drastically improve your site.

• Straying from Web standards – This holds true for not only the style standards of the organization and department, but the Web in general as well. For example, light text on a dark background has been shown to slow reading speeds by up to 30%, so use it wisely. Also, no one wants to see your flashing, seizure-inducing banner or your tie-dyed horizontal row divider.
• Endless text – Overestimation of the interest of users in textual content is all too common. A recent study found that users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less. Skimming has become the norm, and it should be accounted for in your writing and layout.
• Bad architecture – Some experts report a site’s information architecture encompasses 80% of usability problems. Investment in an architecture planning stage, including addressing features like logical content organization, link labeling, and consistent navigation, typically pays off several times over in usability.
• Mobile inaccessibility – The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. This means that your site must support mobile devices, load quickly, and allow for my stubby fingers to distinguish between tiny text on my phone while I am driving my flying car (they’re coming out any day now, right?).

These select oversights most commonly occur when designing for the Web in isolation from users. This facilitates forgetfulness that real people will be using your site, not merely the idea that you have of their behavior. Not having the resources or time for usability testing is no excuse for user interaction, when meaningful feedback can be generated by asking simple tasks of those around you. For example, you can get some sense of how a novice user would handle your architecture by asking a parent or grandparent to find something on your site without using “the Google.”

In honor of my first blog post a couple weeks ago, my boss presented me with a silky smooth milk chocolate Dove bar, which I spread out and savored over a 3-day span. (I did not blog because I was motivated by this chocolate bar. I had heard mention of a chocolate-y incentive but for some reason I had assumed it was more of a metaphorical chocolate bar, which made it all the sweeter when it turned out to be very, very real).

I hope my boss realizes that, now that she has set the bar (pun intended), I will expect chocolate in increasing qualities each time I blog. Over the next few months I expect to receive the following in this order: chocolate chip cookies, a chocolate bunny, a three-layer chocolate mousse cake, a chocolate fondue feast complete with fresh fruit for dipping, and—eventually—my very own chocolate fountain to reside permanently in my office.

Also after my last blog post, my co-workers started feeling sorry for me for never getting mail. So the next time I passed my mailbox, it looked like this:

If you think you’re looking at a toy car, an IU promotional mug from the 80’s, and some kind of nut that has been spray-painted metallic for reasons I cannot even begin to imagine, you’d be correct. Mail at last!

I’m still having a lot of fun working here and I continue to learn a lot about writing, marketing, and IU. Our office has been working hard to develop a YouTube channel for Indiana University. When we all arrived at our weekly staff meeting a couple weeks ago, we were told to go out on campus to interview students about what they watch on YouTube and to come back an hour later to report our findings. (The student I ended up interviewing told me that he watches YouTube videos to learn military tactics, which I found slightly frightening…) But I think we received a lot of interesting insights that day and started developing some really innovative ideas. I also got to spend some time surfing YouTube to see what kinds of videos IU students have made and posted that we could link as favorites on our channel.

I’ll leave you with a few of my personal favorites:

IU’s Straight No Chaser—Stand By Me

Why I Like IU: Squirrel Cam

Jordan River Junkies

A little over a month ago, I nervously entered the Office of Creative Services to begin my first day as an intern. It was 9 a.m.—an hour I had not experienced since high school—and I was priding myself on being able to function so early in the day. Like a real adult with a real job! (An hour later I realized that I was wearing my shirt backwards. I snuck off to the bathroom to fix it, but only after being introduced to everyone in the office.)

Anyway. I am really enjoying myself here. This is, after all, my first job that doesn’t involve serving either pizza or fried chicken. Also, I have two computer monitors at my desk, which makes it easier to pretend that I am extremely and irreplaceably important. Also making me feel important is my very own mailbox. I have never gotten any mail here, but each day I walk by it, hopeful. I refuse to be discouraged. I like to think that one day, when I least expect it, a piece of mail will be waiting for me. If not, maybe at least someone else’s mail will be delivered into my box accidentally, which would be equally exciting.

But I do more here than open multiple browser windows to spread out on my two monitors (just because I can) and think up reasons to pass by my mailbox six or seven times a day. I have spent most of my time working on the Founders Day booklet. I have been researching the distinguished teachers who will be honored with awards at Founders Day this year and writing page-long biographies of each. I have gotten to read about some amazing people, and I truly feel honored to get to do something for them—even in this very small and anonymous way.

I also enjoy going to biweekly meetings with all the other editors here to discuss current projects. We have also been known to debate our favorite punctuation marks, which is something that nobody outside of this office has ever wanted to do with me. For a while the editors were split evenly between the semicolon and the em dash, but slowly everyone but me has jumped to the em dash ship. I will loyally stand beside the semicolon until the day that I die, though, even if it costs me friends, family, and health. (Unless I eventually decide I like the em dash better. I didn’t even know what it was until a few weeks ago. And secretly, I’m still figuring out how to use it.)
I will continue to update about my internship throughout the spring. But right now, it’s time to go check my mailbox.

by Julia Boriss