What a great box design. Can't wait!

You nearly had me there Stuart. My heart stopped for a moment until I realized it was April in the EST and read the fine print on the box

Nice find..
Soo.. Is it April, already.? Hah..

Old news Stuart, Bill Troop has been a beta tester for this product for the last eight years - see his blog for details.

Apparently you'll be able to "Develop advanced Flash content, applications, and video experiences" with Fontographer MX ;)

This does seem like a big step for Macromedia to feature a new package on their site...

haha!

Nice one, Stu!

Holy crap, I'm an idiot... Got me.

Pity.

aahaa poisson d'avril!

The Competition 2006
Fog vs. FL

sweet!

=====
Stuart - where did you find it? a link?

This must be the special font editing tool needed to optimize for Saffron.

looks like you got a few people going here, stu. including me (for a while). hey and off topic, have you gotten my email? i'm afraid they're getting filtered. too many tech support requests or something... ;^D

Cruel, very cruel, Stuart. :-) Nicely done, though.

the clue is the date of post :-)

Dear Typophiles,

Happy April Fools Day One and All!

Finally years of planning have met their reward that I am fortunate enough to have pulled off perhaps the most obscure practical joke ever, knowing only a handful of people in the world would truly 'get it' . . . Consider it my joybuzzer to the Type World!

For those who still have a shadow of doubt, feel free to contact the folks at Macromedia to inquire about the new Fontographer MX for 2006.

Warmly,
Stuart :D

It's nine years, Simon - can't you even count?

Oh God, I'm the world's oldest beta tester!

Oh - - but wait a minute - - there is someone even older. Lucas de Groot with a late FontStudio beta I gave him -- courtesy of that bootblack from ITC.

Since it's past the second and now that Stuart has revealed his deception publically, I can reveal that there's invisible ink in my first post that would otherwise have been a dead giveaway. I didn't want to ruin the fun. Good job, Stuart.

Stuart, a typophiliac nit-pick: the typeface isn't Helvetica.
I seem to recall that the Macromedia ID was done by Neville Brody, and I always thought that the face is Venus, with some mods such as angled trims of the horizontal stems in the Bold.
But perhaps my memory and assumptions are wrong. Can anyone confirm the design details?

Nick, I confirm and the family was done by FB.

> > Font Bureau developed the family known as Vonnes for the project. It is/was also used by Boston magazine.

On the Brody site...

http://www.researchstudios.com/home/003-projects/macromedia/macromedia.html

Cheers, Si

>the family known as Vonnes

And then there's Chank's "Venis" (Pronounced like the Italian city, of course...)

This was Jim Von Ehre's last Macromedia project before going into nanotech. The new Macromedia had commissioned Landor to do a corporate ID and they'd designed a logo with a circular munching yellow M, and a freeware TT t-face named, , , I forgot but remember that Jim wasn't sure if he'd got his $ worth, as was usual with him. I'd been working on venus for nothing else, and Neville was hiding out at my house trying to tweek 100's of images into his second book. Jim called looking for advice on the landor thing, and wanted to know how he could get neville from london to texas which I turned into Jim coming to my house. I also rounded up Matthew Carter and Alvin Eisenman to review the Landor work, so by the time Jim left, Landor was unhired, Venus was Vonnes, 54 styles of tweeked Venus and Neville was doing the ID. He took Vonnes and designed all the packaging a couple of times, and MM took them (after I finished kerning and adding

David, do publish the 'Venusian spectrum' - I'm sure it's great. I did a multiple master of Venus a few years ago, but I can't find the files anywhere. If I recall correctly, I did not do enough redesign to allow the master to extend over a really wide range of weights - either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view.

What kind of forum is this, where an April Fool's prank post devolves into a historical inquiry into the exact geneaology of a corporate identity font, with several of the principals participating in the thread? I'm frankly appalled.

Viva Typophile!

I'm with you Ralph . . . Funny thing is, I spent about 20 minutes mocking up the box from a Freehand MX box. I could have spent longer trying to get all the details worked out but I figured it was convincing enough to create a 'shadow of doubt' . . .

I'm not sure if you were in San Francisco for Typecon to listen to Ed Benguat's SoTA award acceptance speech, but it is reflected in this thread. Ed had a great bit about how it's impossible for a type enthusiast/designer to read a newspaper and proceeded to pantomime how a quick glance at a folded newspaper turns into pulling it closer, closer, taking off the glasses, closer again till your nose is almost touching the thing . . . It's funny because it's true and I expect nothing less from my peers :D

>...closer again till your nose is almost touching the thing . . <
We are just nosey about type :-)

>Ed had a great bit about how it's impossible for a type enthusiast/designer to read a newspaper

Newspapers aren't the most difficult thing to read, it's Menus! How many times have you been looking at the menu for 10 minutes, and realized you haven't read a single thing, and have no idea what you want to eat, then end up ording something just because the name has a very interesting "y" in it?

(BTW, what is it about menus that they are almost always designed to be difficult to read? Why do designers choose brown-ink-on-tan-stock for an item that will be read in a low-light situation? I've always wondered...)

Stuart your work is great. With the whole election-time inquiry
into the authenticity of documents, you can bet people are going
to nit-pick even the best practical jokes. =)

Thanks Joe! BTW, I figured out how to forge an ordinal in a document using Microsoft Word if anybody wants the 411! - Please nobody respond to that :D

Regarding menus Jay I had the opportunity to work on a menu once and it can be an organizational nightmare. The biggest challenge being restaurants change menu items so quickly to keep 'ahead' of the competiton and keep the regulars interested . . .

I'm also convinced menus serve as more of a branding piece than for function at some places . . . Counterpoint to that, I've said it before, I'll say it again, there is an entire industry in Chinese menus which I am repulsed and strangely attracted to simultaniously . . . Also, they are among the easiest to read considering the array of options . . .

:D

> ... how to forge an ordinal ...

There's a Typophile t-shirt in there somewhere.

i was thinking about this thread today. stuart musta had some kinda inside scoop on this one. and we all thought it was a hoax! hook me up with yer top-secret connections, stu! ;^D

Much you have to learn Padwan lerner . . .

Is it no surpise Degobah is surrounded in FOG?

Tis the force that flows through our Macs . . .

:D

now what about “Fontographer: type by design” by Stephen Moye?

Here...

http://typographi.com/001001.php

Si