Bad things happen when you're in a hurry. When you skip your checklists. What kind of bad things? With fonts, funny characters happen.
I know better. I could have totally prevented this hiccup had I followed my checklist. It's there: "Type converted to outlines. Yes | No"
Do you have a production checklist that you follow?
First, let me take you back a couple of months to the beginning of the story. In early November, Blurb surprised all Alt Summit attendees with a gift certificate and instructions to make a book and bring it with them to Salt Lake City.
As you know back in November and December I was in the midst of rebranding, so I waited to start my book until the new branding was finished. (Originally I thought I wouldn't have time to do this project and had crossed it off my list.) This meant I started on the layout and photo processing in January, less than a week before the printing and shipping in-time-to-arrive-for-Alt deadline.
I used my gift certificate to publish the first volume of Dispatches from The Station, one of my passion projects. The first dispatch tackles the challenge of defining the good life and begins at the beginning, the cross country road trip on which this blog, The Road to the Good Life, was born.
One of my favorite fonts, Park Avenue, "a lighthearted contemporary script designed by Robert E. Smith in 1933 for American Type Founders," rendered oddly in the first printing of Dispatches from The Station. This problem didn't show up in the proof and doesn't occur in the PDF version of the quarterly missive. (This could have happened with my business cards as well, but in that case I followed my checklist and converted all type to outlines.)
ProTip: If using Blurb's plug-in for Adobe InDesign,
to ensure fonts will print properly, after spellchecking and proofreading,
create a copy of your book, and convert all type to outlines.
to ensure fonts will print properly, after spellchecking and proofreading,
create a copy of your book, and convert all type to outlines.
Blurb was amazing at helping me troubleshoot the problem, refunding my order and issuing me a credit so that I could reprint (after changing the font or uploading the art with the text converted to outlines) my project. There was even enough time had I wanted to go for it, to print the book, select the fastest shipping, and ship directly to Alt to arrive today, in time for Blurb's mini-party tonight, providing everything went right.
I won't lie, I was close to tears. The dispatch is amazing, I love the quality of the paper, the slickness of the cover. With the exception of the four odd characters where spaces should be on the cover, it's a great representation of what I can do and of my blog.
Luckily, a fellow Alt attendee offered up a suggestion, applying a new cover. A new DIY project for Alt was born. After a trip to Flax, I had paper and a plan.
Ciao Bella!
Eden!
Get the Font: Park Avenue Medium is available from Adobe for $25.99, it's PostScript Type 1, an old format which could cause printing issues if not converted to outlines when using.
