Category Archives: News

I came home from a recent AIGA Chicago event with a copy of Fonts in Focus 9 (I guess I’ll have to pick up 1–8 in back issues or wait for the trade). I actually took two. One for me to read, and one for my three-year-old, who is crazy about letters and typefaces.

It turned out to be a good move, as it has become one of his favorite things to read. Yesterday found us reading it on the couch where I had to explain to him what terminals are and what symmetry means.

On the downside, this corresponds with that age where he constantly asks why. Which is how I ended up in a lengthy conversation about why Comic Sans is the worst.

Well this is handy. Google Docs now lets you upload more things! Useful things!

From the Docs Blog:

• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

I’m sure this has all kinds of implications, but I see myself mostly using it for proofing. I find more and more that I’m uploading PDFs to Google Docs and sending people the link, rather than trying to wrangle a big file or (gasp) printing it out.

Saving Illustrator files as PDFs and Photoshop files as JPGs has become the norm, and when I clean out files, I find that I have a lot of extraneous files named project.pdf, project_proof.pdf and project_final.pdf. Being able to upload and share a native illustrator file makes saves you from that. For a designer, this makes Google Docs a viable system for storing and sharing files.

If they could add support for showing InDesign documents like PDFs, think about how much trouble that would save.