While I was once an avid amateur typographer (I would never dare call myself a graphic artist), these days I touch my design program about once a year. Yes, it’s holiday card time again…
This card started with a photo—my snow photo—and built outward from there. That wasn’t the problem; it was the type. Specifically, Mac OS X’s built in Font Book. Which would be an industrial strength font management tool, were it not for its propensity to drop my 1GHz PowerBook G4 to its knees when adding (or enabling, or disabling) more than one font at a time. You know this Apple training web page where it says, “or drag an entire folder full of fonts into Font Book to add them”? It is to laugh. Har-de-har-har. Only if you want to see the spinning beachball of death for up to five minutes at a time.
On the plus side, once I had my fonts in Font Book, it was a snap to preview them until I found the right script font for the cover, drop caps, and tag line of my card. on the minus side, I spent most of my four-hour waiting room sojourn at the Volkswagen dealership getting my font collection straightened out.
Then I found a printer. Since I didn’t want to repeat last year’s card printing disaster (Kinkos color copies—cost more than my universal remote), I started calling printing companies. And amazingly found one that was not only reasonably priced, but allowed me to print the file directly to them over the Internet. Very cool, and it turned out great.