Yep, the mysterious Ornates Collection with the infamous Adriatic not one but two people were looking for in the past few months. We have it and no idea where it came from either.

I remember these. At least most of them (perhaps all?) were knockoffs of other people's fonts. I never checked them out closely enough to have any opinion of their quality.

T

I remember getting cheap junk mail pieces crammed with so much stuff I never wanted to look at it. It looked like an explosion in a presstype factory. My scholarly description would boil down to smething like "cheap crap from a carnival huckster"
My shoot-from-the-hip comment would be much less kind.

ChrisL

Chris L has obviously no idea what ot takes to produce a commercial font collection. The Expresiv Series was introduced at a time when a reasonable font package cost $1,000. The Ornate collection, and 3 of the 6 collections were value font packages. No excuses made about quality either - though most were intended for desktop users, they were extensively reviewed and praised at the time. The products are not currently available. And, yes, I was the publisher! Regards, Tim McGuinness, Ph.D. - McGuinnessDesigns.com

> they were extensively reviewed and praised at the time.

So was disco.

hhp

I notice that Mr. McGuiness made no comment regarding the "knockoff" statements made by other posters. Curious.

I know what it takes to produce a professional font collection including fair payment to the designers of the original fonts. I don't mean just the skilled technicians who made the knock-offs. Then again you said "commercial font collection" implying the profit margin being large enough to support providing cheap type�basically the business of selling as opposed to designing type. The two are NOT mutually exclusive. There are font houses who pay designers for the products they profit from. I wonder if that is the case here? Tim? Did you pay the original designers of the fonts you "based your collection on" or did you just make the type just a tad different knowing how pathetic the IP and copyrights laws were then?

The truth is Tom, my comments were aimed at the presentaion I saw in the catalogues which came in the mail, not at the actual fonts which (seeing the tacky catalogues) I never purchased. I am sure your font producers did a bang-up job of copying.

You did give yourself an out. You said the type was aimed at the "Desktop Publishing" market and you probably hit that right on the tacky target. But, I was not part of the DTP crowd, no maroon polyester pants with white belt and matching shoes in my closet.

I wonder who reviewed and praised those knock-off beauties? I am sure they were top type designers of the eighties. I am sure Tim will name names of the deserving design masters who reviewed the work and make me look like a fool�at least I hope he does.

ChrisL

> I wonder who reviewed and praised those knock-off beauties?

Trade magazines which happened to also feature a full-page ad for the fonts a few pages down?

hhp

>The products are not currently available. And, yes, I was the publisher! Regards, Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.<

Why are they not currently available? Was there a legal action or threat of one? or did the marketplace just speak and ( in a lack-of-sales kind of way) let you know that in their "review and appraisal" was a tad less heaped with praise than your previous reviews indicated?

ChrisL

My concern is for the original designers as well. Many of these fonts look very similar to existing fonts by other designers. I would like to know whether the original font designers (or the current owners of the drawings) were contacted or compensated in some way.

I tracked down the person who originally purchased the Expresiv font disk. The sense she got was that large font collections such as Expresiv simply weren't available at the time this collection was sold. Perhaps Thomas or someone else can confirm or deny this claim. Was there a lag time in the early years of desktop publishing in acquiring an extensive library of fonts?

Thanks for speaking up, Tim. I'm sure that assembling this collection was not an easy task at the time. Can you address our concerns about the original font designers that your collection is copying?

(listening to the crickets...)

Well, it seems someone has an axe to grind or two.

FACTS:

We aquired full rights and ownership for several major type houses, and published original designs. We also published sets from other font houses under license, such as Monotype. We also published under the original publisher's name as well ( a total of 99 unique products we published by us ) The Expresiv series of 19 products included type for over a dozen type houses (names changed to protect their brands, but they still made their piece) We simply had a different marketing model, oriented to expanding the market, as opposed to marketing to elitists. As a result, we sold 100,000's, as opposed to simply 100's.

We also sold significant clipart collections as well - in all cases original work, under license, paying the designers/owners royalties (as we did with the fonts too). It's easy to take cheap shots when you haven't a clue.

It would also be interesting to look up the copyright laws on fonts. Type houses have been "knocking" each other off for 100 years, because it is legal. In general, we went after original and interesting collections. We simply out marketed most others.

Why are the collections not available now? Simple. The primary sales tool was my Graphics Express Catalog, which was the nations leading graphics product catalog. It won numerous publishing industry awards for design quality. Tacky only to an elitist. It had a subscriber based of 500,000 per issue. Our list came from companies like Monotype, Adobe, Corel, and others. The catalog was discontinued in 1997 after the parent company was aquired by Global DirectMail, and I was turned towards moving the company's 16 domestic divisions, and 13 european divisions onto the web. Thus, when the catalog was closed (not because of profitability - but because of a change in focus), the product line (Expresiv & ProVektor, and the others) were also discontinued. They may be brought back fairly soon however.

Reviewed: The various products were reviewed by a variety of publications. Including: Adobe Magazine, Aldus Magazine, Arts&Letters Magazine, Corel Magazine, Desktop Publishing Magazine, Artworx Magazine, PC Magazine, PC World Magazine, and about 50 others. As always, if you want to pay the price, your welcome to, most did not.

I make no apologies about these products. They enabled vast numbers of customers to produce exceptional designs. There was variety in quality, such as the Ornate collection which was intended for lower level users. But we also produced products equal to the best in the market, for a 20th the price. And yes, there were other large collections in the market from MonoType, Adobe, and others; with prices of $1,000 or more! Sometimes you make more selling for $29 than a $1,000

FYI, I also happen to be the co-inventor and co-designer of the worlds best selling low and high end forms design applications (which has been in continuous distribution for 18 years!), as well as several major graphics apps. I do understand the difference between the levels of the publishing industry. My focus has always been on expanding the market by bringing quality at a lower price, as well as creating new product categories. It's easy to rag on someone when you haven't produced yourself, but some of us actually create the products you use!

Apologize to the list for the rant!

Sorry for the dubble posting - a website glitch!

Thomas remembers correctly. At least some of the fonts shown on Mr. McGuinness�s web site were knockoffs, produced and sold in the early 1990s by Jerry Saperstein under his FontBank label. And truly awful fonts they were, too.

I recognize many of the names shown in the Classic Fonts set � Abbess, Balthazar, Bandicoot, Chickadee, etc. They were certainly knockoffs, not very well-made knockoffs, either � not just poorly spaced but badly drawn.

Ordinarily iIt wouldn�t be worth mentioning, but I see some revisionist history in this thread, and it seemed to me it should be corrected.

Kathleen

Forgive me � Safari told me it couldn�t post, so I tried again. And again.

Silly me, to believe a piece of software.

I�d delete the dupes if I knew how.

Mea culpa.


Kathleen

Thank you, Yves (aka Troubleman)! I've been reading for a long time but only lately felt moved to coment.

I'm an online veteran so hate to make such a rookie mistake!

Oh, well. :-)

Thanks for the kind welcome.



Kathleen



Kathleen

It's great to see you here, KT! It's been far too long since we've hung out in the same place....

Warmest regards,

T

Good to hear from you Kathleen,

I was wondering what you were up to these days.

Gerald Giampa
Lanston Type Company

You, too, Thomas. I hear you have a new baby � congratulations!

We are new pseudo grandparents � our �borrowed� son and his wife had a daughter in March. There is nothing like a baby to put things in perspective!


Kathleen

Thanks, Gerald.

I am not up to much. Living on a river, watching the cormorants and egrets that contend for space on our dock!

I think we�re all getting old. . .


Kathleen

My perspective is increasingly primitive....

Baby cute.

Sleep good.

T

Thomas,
Things don't change much later:

Baby in college, still cute, miss her

Can't sleep, must pay tuition.

ChrisL

I meant largely in the virtual sense. I "met" and got to know Kathleen on the CompuServe DTP forums about 10-12 years ago. I only saw her in person a couple of times. Last was at Seybold maybe 5 years ago?

Hmmm. Getting rather OT here, I guess.

T

Thomas: I think it was ATypI Boston. Was that in 1999?

Yves: Yes, it was ATypI Antwerp. 1994? Yikes!

Long time. I'm just waking up, I think. <g>