(apologies in advance for the length of this)

I work in a large creative studio as a lettering artist. From my very first interview 8 years ago I noticed a lack of attention toward typography— this from a company who’s product is copy driven! In that interview I asked about the possibility of getting involved in type design as well. The response was that they had someone on the team who did that and all you needed to do was give him a sheet of letters and he would make a font. (The font guy had no lettering or typography background, but did take a 3 day workshop many years ago in font software.) I was a bit disappointed with that response, but decided I would still try to pursue it. Within the first year I asked about getting Fontographer and having a go at doing my own font. They were a bit wary of the idea as they thought it would take too much time, but said they would let me do it on a trial basis. My first font was produced in less time than their veteran font guy and is still one of our most popular proprietary fonts. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. Now I carry a full load of lettering jobs and am expected to design fonts as well.

My latest dilemma involves OpenType. Our design production is done using Freehand (which doesn’t support OT) with extensive use of template keys and scripts for tech checking, etc. There is a team that is supposedly working on making a shift over to Adobe CS3, but the corporate wheels spin slowly. There is some talk about purchasing fonts, but there is no real structure around font licensing decisions. As you can probably sense from my writing, I don’t really have a personality suited to the corporate cubical environment, but I do love that I can do lettering and font development for a living.

Earlier this month I sent an email to my boss with a proposal attached to start getting some of our proprietary fonts turned into OpenType fonts that take advantage of some of the substitution features. It was a bit lengthy as I felt the need to explain some of the advantages of OT. As expected, I got absolutely no response. One of my team members volunteered to ask him about it. My current boss (for about 3 years) is conservative and people tend to fear him. I’ve been told he actually likes me because “He doesn’t cause trouble”. I think I need to cause trouble. I thought I would at least try to get a response and if that doesn’t get anywhere, I would send it out to his manager and possibly the head of creative. I went over his head once on an occasion where he was being completely