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Not up here in Joke-la-homa. Early in-person voting at county courthouses only just started yesterday. Around round goes all day Friday and then one more limited round Saturday from 8:00am to 2:00pm. That's all us Okies get. I happened to drive past our county courthouse yesterday afternoon...

With Fort Sill nearby we got a lot of PowerPoint PPT files. Just as useless as a JPEG image, except a dose of more hassle.

Lawton miraculously didn't do too badly with this particular storm. We had some spotty power outages in town. There were a few interruptions of POTS land line phone service and cable Internet service in some places. Overall it could have been a lot worse. I was pretty worried yesterday with how...

I always love (sarcasm) what too many clients do after I request a vector-based version of their logo instead of the dopey low-rez JPEG image they sent on the first attempt. A couple hours (or days) later I'll get an Adobe Illustrator AI file or an EPS, PDF or even CDR file containing the same...

I swear I've seen this script typeface before (and maybe even used it) but I can't jog my brain well enough to remember what it is. The sample comes from some client-provided artwork (I spaced apart the connected letters). I tried the What the Font applet at MyFonts web site, but nothing there...

This page can be good for research and inspiration: https://fontsinuse.com/ Another great type designer's own page: https://www.marksimonson.com/

It looks like a Photoshop effect, done either within Photoshop or a live raster-based effect (like inner glow) within Adobe Illustrator. As far as gradients on line strokes goes, Adobe Illustrator does support that. However, I don't think a gradient on a line stroke is going to achieve the right...

Very sad news. Ed Benguiat taught type design at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan for many years (including the time I attended SVA at the end of the 1980's into the 1990's). There are very few people, if any at all, who could match Benguiat for his broad contribution to type in the latter...

A long time ago I made a printed booklet with visual samples of the most popular fonts we had at the time. We allowed customers to look through that as well as the fonts section in the CorelDRAW manuals. All that did was create more problems than it solved. Most clients have zero expertise in...

Many newer script typefaces in OpenType format have alternative glyphs, swash alternatives and custom ligatures to make them not look electronic. The artwork could still have been made via a computer-based font file; I just don't know what typeface might have been used if that was the case.

Even if there is little or no risk of getting caught altering the colors or elements in a major company's logo or branding system the professional thing to do is adhere to the system, even if there are aspects of it you or the local franchise client do not like. Willfully deviating from a major...

Clients get in trouble for deviating from branding guidelines in their signage. When that happens many clients will try to pass the buck back to the sign company. Sign companies are supposed to know better. I've been around long enough to see reps from major companies force a local store with...

Pages 68-73 in the C21 Masterbrand Guidelines list the Typold, Oakes and Barlow families for various uses. The same applies in the sign guidelines. Myriad Pro and Helvetica don't work. Aside from the type requirements, the current C21 program is a real PITA for the white space requirements and...

For specific logo creation tasks, we charge up front for that. Due to issues with geometry and aspect ratio sometimes it is necessary to work in the logo design as part of the sign project. But the logo design is a line item thing since such work has the potential to involve a lot of revisions...

I don't know. I see so much cut-rate, unprofessional $#!+ being pumped out by our industry that I'm afraid we are gladly giving the regulators the very knife they use to cut our throats. I've griped about this before, and feel it is falling on 100% deaf ears. It seems no one in this industry...

The top, more squared example does indeed look like Eurostile. However, it looks like someone oddly chose to grab the Eurostile Extended Bold weight and then squeeze it to roughly the same horizontal proportions as regular Eurostile Bold. The same thing is possible with the Microgramma knock-off...

The size limitations aren't quite as much an issue anymore. The Illustrator 24.2 (CC 2020) June update added the large canvas mode, which expands the maximum artboard size up to 2275" X 2275". The AI 24.3 August update added some new typographic features that make sign design much easier in...

The original intention was to try to save steel mill jobs. The tariffs didn't even manage to do that. I doubt the tariffs have done that either. The materials cost hikes, declines in sales and tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs amounts to a pretty big negative hit to the tax base.

Dumb question, but could it be something as simple as CMYK values? Lots of people just use a 100% Black, which often outputs as a really dark gray. Under the Preferences menu in Adobe Illustrator there is a setting called "Appearance of Black," and the default settings are On Screen, Display...

The tariffs on steel and aluminum have not worked. If anything the tariffs have backfired. Steel mills in places like Michigan ended up laying off thousands of employees anyway. But other industries, such as the auto industry, have laid off far more workers.