Trouble with Fonts

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Wes Johnson

My Personal Brand

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on my Personal Brand.  Today, I was ready to commit my logo, domain name & twitter reference, to a local embroidery company.  I was hoping to get some shirts embroidered with the font you see here.  As I had mentioned yesterday, I had already spent a bit of time going through 117 variations.  We finally settled on this arrangement.

My preferred logo

My preferred logo

A few days before, I had talked with one of the owners about the cost of embroidering.  The charge is usually by the number of stitches.  There was no mention of any issues with fonts, so it didn’t occur to me that there would be any problems.  I bought a couple of shirts today and brought them in for the embroidering job.

Font confusion

I don’t know if new embroidery machines are like this now, but it appears that the machine this company is using, has proprietary fonts.  None of the Font names matched.  A form of copy protection?  Or some form of future revenues?  I guess it does understand True Type fonts, but none of the fonts matched my preferred font for my logo.

Font alternative
Fortunately, the machine understands True Type fonts.  I found a font that appears to be similar. 
Alternative Logo

Alternative Logo

When I got home, I tried to use this font with my Paint.Net program, but the font family wasn’t in my system.  I ended up finding a downloadable True Type font on the internet.  I downloaded Lydian BT to my computer.  The embroidery machine has Lydian Dak.  The alternative logo on my computer looks similar to the preferred but it’s a little sharper.
Tomorrow, I’m going to take the preferred image in to see if they can scan it in and create a reasonable facsimile of the Logo I was trying to produce.  At least now, if the scanned image doesn’t work out, I do have an Alternative plan.
Lesson Learned
Make sure you know which image file formats the vendors software prefers.  Get the True Type font list ahead of time.  If I had know these facts, I wouldn’t have spent so much time looking at all the variations I couldn’t possibly use.  Be flexible.  You never know when a curve ball with be thrown your way.  Always have a Plan-B.
Till next time, I’ve learned you don’t always get what you want, but you run with what you’ve got.
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Creating Twitter background

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Wes Johnson
Twitter background

Twitter background

Making the background image was easy

It wasn’t too hard to create my Twitter background.  I used Paint.Net with layers to create this one.  I loaded the main picture to the bottom layer.  In case you didn’t notice, this was an image from my recent hiking trip to Lake Chabot in Castro Valley.  I created a second layer for the text.  It took a little while to get the text to look the way I wanted it.  Then I saved it.  It took a few tries, because the first time, the picture wasn’t scaled properly.  I ended up with the focus being zoomed into the upper left part of the picture.  I went back and changed the dimensions of the picture to about 20″ wide, then resaved it.  This brought most of the picture into focus.  For wider screens I’m sure it will look normal.  I’ll probably do 17″ next time.  I’ll probably do a little more experimentation with the image size and the background color.

Font selection was the hardest part of the image

It took me longer to figure out which font I would use than it did to generate the image file.  For the font choice I was going for a specific look that says,”This is Wes Johnson”  I initially created 117 various combinations of Font families, boldness, and capitalization.  I picked my 3 favorites from the list, then I had some others pick our their 5 choices out of the 117.  I am still amazed that there was unanymous agreement on the Font family and capitalization to use.  I chose the font that is on the picture above.  I’m sure I’ll update the image in the future or at least add more personal marketing info.  In the meantime, I think this image will work fine.

Till next time, visit my Twitter profile and follow me @mrwes

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Your Personal Brand on Twitter

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Wes Johnson

First impressions say a lot about who you are. When people visit your site for the first time.  It needs to represent the look and feel of who you are. A while back I setup a Twitter account @mrwes.  At the time, I didn’t think that much about decorating it.  I had the default blue clouds theme.  That wasn’t too bad when I started, but lately I’ve noticed that everybody seems to have a customized background. Some of them are really cool. Suddenly, it seems like, the default theme looks like the sign of a newbie. I didn’t want to look like a newbie, so I used the design option and changed the theme to something closer to my style.  The new theme I chose will do for a little while.  I have been working on what I want my Personal Brand to look like.  What icon or logo will I use? What will my message be? What will the color scheme be?  This article on Custom Twitter Backgrounds discusses things to consider while you’re deciding how you will present your brand.

Till next time, I’ll be working out the details on what my Personal Brand will look like on twitter

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Social Media Marketing

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Wes Johnson

While searching on the internet for good explanations of Social Networks, I came across this video from Lee Lefever.
His website http://www.commoncraft.com/ has many well produced videos that simplifies web concepts like Social Networking, Social Media, Twitter, RSS, Web Search Strategies, Social Bookmarking, Blogs, Podcasting,  etc.  He has videos to explain other difficult concepts.

If you don’t see the youtube video, it may be blocked wherever you’re viewing this.  Visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc later.

I also searched for explanations about why Social Networks are important, I came across this video from Perry Belcher.

He basically says don’t join Social Networks to make money.  Don’t try to sell stuff directly on Social Networks.  You should join Social Networks to build relationships.  That’s where the real magic of Social Networking begins.


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The URL for Perry’s article is http://perrybelcher.com/blog6/2008/11/30/how-to-make-money-with-social-media/.

If you don’t see the youtube video, it may be blocked wherever you’re viewing this.  Visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn1cspHx7DU later.

Till next time, keep building your Social Networks

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mrwes.net goes mobile

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Wes Johnson

Yesterday while I was waiting for a meeting, I decided to visit mrwes.net to see what my blog looked like on my PDA. To my dismay, it didn’t even display at all. It just appeared to hang. I’m not sure if it actually hung or if it was displaying information that the PDA couldn’t handle. Whatever the case was, after a couple of minutes, I decided to reboot the PDA. This was a totally unacceptable user experience, so today I did something about it. I installed the WordPress PDA & iPhone Plugin. The installation was pretty painless. After the installation was complete, I revisited mrwes.net and to my delight it displayed without any issues. The user interface is straight forward and so far I have nothing but good things to say about it.

I’m thankful I had that downtime yesterday. If it wasn’t for the wait, I might never have known my website was incompatible with PDA browsers.

Now my blog is compatible with PDA browsers.

Till next time, I hope you enjoy the new PDA functionality 🙂

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