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    This work by Amy Watson of Amy W. Designs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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    Sunday, February 21, 2010

    Hi again! (Update!) & Open Type Fonts

    Okay, you may or may not remember that I'm in my last session to get my degree... and well it's kicking my butt. My "single" assignment this week had 4 parts... each broken down into about 6 more subparts. Sounds like fun right? It was like all the hard work we did last class (you know over 5 weeks) had to be done in one week this session. Whew, it's been rough. This last class is putting together our portfolio so we can then go out and find a job, yay! Also Lent began this past week so there's been extra services and we had an accident at church on Friday and so I got to go to the hospital with one of our seniors. Yippee, I love emergency rooms! I'm still teaching Sunday school and was volunteered for another session. We're gearing up for VBS as well, so meeting are going on every which way I turn. Let's see.... hubby got taken off day shift and put back onto rotating. We've had snow. Emma knocked out one of her baby teeth, then managed to wash it down the drain. I'm still competing in the Biggest Moo-ser contest at Chick-fil-a and even was the week's biggest for losing 9 lbs this past week. The treadmill running/walking in this house is going fairly consistently. We're all running at least 3 days a week if not more. Yes, even Emma gets on it for a few minutes (between 3-10) and walks for a bit, cause she thinks it's fun. I think that's about it.

    I did manage to get a mini kit into the shop last month. My contribution to the team MK When in Rome. It looks gorgeous!

    I hope you all like it too!

    Here are a few shots of Emma in the snow:


    With Mommy

    With Bump the snowman, notice she stole my hat cause hers got all wet with snow.

    Happy Scrapping y'all!

    _________________________________________________________________

    Open Type Fonts: Facts, Tips & Praise.

    Okay, we;ll start with the story. I found the exact font I wanted for a school design project and it was CU for only $20- awesome right? Well I grabbed it in OTF (Open Type Font) form as that's all they had, but seriously it works on PC or MAC so why not right? And I installed it and went to work in Potoshop. But what? That's not what it looked like when I in my sample! That's the alt font! Did I get the wrong one? What happened?

    I wrote the company and it seems in the Adobe Products CS3/4 you can do very cool things with OTFs. It seems this one font I got for $20 had over 3000 characters!!! There's like 10 different letter A's to choose from. How awesome is that? PS offers some flexibility but Illustrator and Dreamweaver really offer up the tools to use these OTF to their fullest. Also you can change the language with a click of a mouse in OTF- how cool is that?

    (InDesign's Glyph palette- look 6 characters for A)

    Anywho after researching and figuring this all out with some help I wondered why we didn't cover this in my design class? And why don't more people know about this. It's a wonderful tool that I'm sure most of us don't know about. I mean most don't even mess with their leading or kerning let alone choose the perfect character for each spot in a piece. Does it need flourishes? Swashes? What kind of ligatures can I add? To find out about all the cool things OTF can do in the Adboe family you can go HERE.
    Here's a peek at how to work with OTF in PS CS3 & 4

    (The Open Type menu in PS, accessed through the character menu- little triangle expands menu in the upper right corner then just rollover and click.)

    I hope this has opened your eyes to some of the col possibilities that are open to us typographically with OTFs, I know it has mine! So look for those fonts with OTF suffixes and pay careful to what the character count is. You could get a deal for $20 or less, like me!