Rays of LightThe musings of Ray Trygstad: IT/Web guy, educator, Naval officer, world traveler and sometime preacher.
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| Rays of Light The musings of Ray Trygstad: IT/Web guy, educator, Naval officer, world traveler and sometime preacher. |
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March 17, 2004
Design Resources
There are hundreds of free font sites online; I looked at a lot trying to find a clone of Adobe PL Latin (never could find it--had to buy it from fonts.com for $22). Of all of these sites, perhaps the best organized with a great selection of fonts is the 3700-font collection of ABC Webworx. It has really cheesy and annoying banner and pop-up ads, which are not stopped by pop-up blockers, but it's worth enduring them because the selection here is great. Another great design resource, especially if you are creating advertising material, is the Russian site the best brands of the world, self described as the “World's largest collection of the brands” [trademarks]. Thousands and thousands of trademarks, all in scalable .eps format, many in color. My guess is that these folks are taking full advantage of the uneven enforcement of intellectual property law in Russia. The site has a lot of relatively discreet ads and it looks like they are probably making money, which is good because I have found it to be indispensible. A similar site--although not as comprehensive--is Logotypes.ru. As I mentioned, I bought a font from fonts.com. It was a Type 1 font, and when I downloaded it, I thought it would not be usable, as there was a .afm file, a .pfb file, and a .inf file--and no .pfm. Taking a chance, I dragged-and-dropped all three files from my desktop to the Windows XP Fonts directory. Lo and behold, a .pfm file was automatically generated and appeared in the Fonts directory! When I drag-and-drop the .pfm file into TextPad, two files open: a .pfm and a .pfb file. So Windows is hiding the .pfb file from us: why? Your guess is as good as mine. Who can fathom Microsoft? Finally, the best color scheme generator--great for Web site schemes and almost infinately flexible--is Pixy's color scheme picker. Try it--I guarantee you'll like it! |
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