Oh I meant that the corporates do design work outside their brand - and by extension I usually do, too.
3 Likes
ah, well, companies w/o a strong brand can be that way. at that point, you don’t really have a visual brand any more. it’s just chaos.
2 Likes
Honest to goodness, pick 3 or 4 fonts that speak to you - one serif, a san serif (preferably Gil Sans), a single line, and a whimsical decorative font….
All those circular signs with eight fonts makes my eyes hurt… YMMV of course. 
4 Likes
Just thinking about that makes my head hurt. LOL
3 Likes
the world of design is much less glamorous than most people imagine.
3 Likes
years ago when I was gaming online. one lady that gamed with us was a graphic designer. she griped about how people thought by getting a program it made them graphic designers.
so her biz, struggled for a while.
4 Likes
technical skill is not design skill. two very different, but often related, skillsets. i came in through the back door with technical skills and learned design skills. but i was a pretty bad designer at first (admittedly). i look back at work i did 30 years ago and cringe.
8 Likes
well her gripe was that suddenly everybody was an expert. oh well.
3 Likes
hah, well, she’s not really wrong. there was a huge wave in the 90s of people who “know photoshop” that thought that meant they were good designers. mostly people who grew up with hacked versions of photoshop. they’d pass themselves off as designers, but you could look at the work and tell they didn’t know what they were doing. fastest way to tell if someone is trained as a designer is to look at their typography. design school means at least four semesters of typography, even for an associates degree. and even then, people don’t tend to really hone typography until they’ve been in the field for a while. it’s not an easy skill for most.
design has become a much more sophisticated corporate skill today than it was 40+ years ago, when generally only bigger companies had trained designers. in the 80s/90s, that started to shift and by 00s it became mainstream, as more and more schools have graphic design programs.
8 Likes
Reminds me of the frenzy of desktop publishing when Pagemaker came out (yeah, I’m old 
). All of a sudden everyone was publishing newsletters and such with about 20 different fonts and clipart dropped like ants on the page. Took awhile for people to figure out just because you had 50 fonts and a half million clipart files available doesn’t mean you needed to try using them all in the same document 
8 Likes
oh, those people are still out there. more companies have just focused on having actual designers instead of random people who know how to open pagemaker.
and yeah, i ran pagemaker when it was still aldus. we can commiserate being old together.
8 Likes
Probably 5-6000 but I don’t keep that many active on my computer, I keep the font files on a networked hard drive and install them as needed. I have a set of big 3-ring binders in which I have printed all of the fonts I own, one binder holds ‘favorites’, fonts I use occasionally, and the other two hold the rest, categorized by style. I also use Adobe Creative Cloud, so I activate and deactivate fonts as needed.
7 Likes
Me too (and I feel attacked now LOL).
I miss Pagemaker. Affinity Publisher has that old Pagemaker feel to it.
5 Likes
eh. pagemaker was fine for what it was, but it was fairly simplistic compared to quark (the most arrogant, evil company in the design space) and indesign.
i was so happy to see quark dethroned. they treated their customers with such disdain and kept their prices in the stratosphere, so it was karmic to see them fall from grace so unceremoniously.
6 Likes
I’ll see your Aldus Pagemaker and raise you pre-windows Ventura Publisher running on MS-DOS + GEM circa 1987.
I felt like I was in heaven when we switched to Pagemaker.
4 Likes
Count me in. 
2 Likes
That is true, but the simplicity was the point. A word document, a couple of pictures, and you could make a newsletter or a decent flyer.
Not everybody needed Quark.
I felt like that too. I somehow never used Ventura Publisher. In the DOS days I became a huge Wordstar fan, and it had some basic DTP capability.
Yes!
4 Likes
oh, i used ventura. used that before pagemaker or quark. and heck, i even used framemaker. back in the early 90s, framemaker had conditional text, and i could use that to do training guides that had the instructor notes in conditional text i could turn on and off before i printed the books.
6 Likes
It’s not a competition, but if it were…
3 Likes
I haven’t played much with fonts in many….many years. At this point probably decades is an accurate statement. Early 2000s, I’m pretty sure I hit the max for windows…98 SE…maybe also XP. I think it was in the 200…perhaps 255. After a while, it would load a partial list and never more. Had a bunch from online and at least one CD of fonts and probably extras from friends who also collected.
5 Likes