27 October 2010

[design] Perils Of Layout - Don't Be That Guy Who Doesn't Embed Fonts Edition

2529.
Placing PDFs for illustrations and ads in publications seems a natural solution. PDFs travel fairly well, come in a bunch of standards for almost any application, and - generally speaking - you don't have to worry about things like having fonts available on your system.

Well, generally speaking. If you're a designer or layout artist, you know that not all PDFs are created equal, or even whole (I relearned this lesson in the very last, major-moby-bigass layout project I just did, of which I'll probably regale y'all perforce. But that's for another missive). PDFs for ads, which typically have a typographical component (and some which are quite type-heavy), can provide a nasty, embarrassing pitfall.

What needs to happen is, your pro-design-type-guy-or-gal needs to load the thing into Acrobat and take a look at those fonts, and see if they're embedded or, if not, you have them on your system. And if you can, you do; if not, you try to have fonts as outlines, which are independent of whether or not you have the fonts installed.

And just what can happen if sufficient proofing doesn't occur? Well, via Typophile (http://typophile.com/node/75600) this can happen:



Yes, this apparently was published as is.

On the one hand, someone's butt probably got cooked real good over this onee.

On the other hand, though, it does bring unexpected life and interest to a type-heavy ad with a kind-of-tired-and-overused-display font on.

Though I imaging the advertiser wasn't going for Dada which, at last check, is still dead.

Click the link above for the whole picture. It's a hoot!

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