Ensure fonts are licensed and ready for the world to adore.
Scan projects for font usage risks just in time.
We’ve hit a lot of home runs during our almost-three-decades-long tenure in the font management game. But we’ve also struck out a few times, which means we disappointed some fans…and that keeps us up at night. So we hit the research and development (R&D) gym hard to add power to Extensis Connect worth cheering about—check it out!
The Connect desktop app includes the Extensis Font Panel for Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop as part of the auto-activation plug-in, providing convenient, direct access to your Connect, Adobe Fonts, and Google Fonts collections.
The panel also provides the ability to create your own groups (called “font digests”) that include any fonts you want to quickly access or segment. For example, a designer working on a rad movie poster can create a digest with all the fonts they need for that specific project, name the digest something super cool like “Jane’s Awesomesauce Movie Poster V1” and then easily access said digest in the Font Panel.
Accessing all of your Adobe and Google fonts from our nifty Font Panel is cool and all, but did you know that you can also search for and add new Adobe and Google fonts to your Connect libraries, all without leaving the app you’re currently working in? Well, you can, and it’s pretty rad.
It’s easy to think of Connect solely as a “font bank,” a tool that lets you store and easily access all your fonts at any time – and while that is one of the benefits, ensuring you are actually allowed to use the fonts in your collection is of equal, if not utmost, importance.
That’s where the “manage” part of “font manager” comes into play – Connect shows you licensing information for each font so that you know where you’re compliant, where you’re not, what needs to be revised, and how to manage it all. That means you no longer must fear those well-dressed lawyers!
If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling through your massive font collection thinking, “Ugh this is mind-numbing…there’s absolutely no way people are using all these fonts,” you were likely correct. It’s easy to quickly amass a huge number of fonts and lose track of how they’re being used and who’s using them.
Connect provides reports on font inventory across your entire creative ecosystem—including identifying troublesome PostScript fonts and all the assets they’re embedded within—so you can put the PostScript problem behind you once and for all.
We know the feeling – you’ve cycled through what feels like a bajillion different fonts to match an oddly specific client request, none are hitting the mark, so you groaaaaannnn at the thought of opening a bunch of tabs and searching different font foundries for a suitable replacement.
With Connect, you don’t have to get bogged down shopping for new fonts – FoundrySearch lets you easily search across a variety of foundries in-app, enabling quick and easy comparison between your own collection and foundries, all in one place.
Few things are worse than a bad case of “Versionitis” – a severely annoying yet common affliction amongst creatives that is caused by a constant stream of V1…V2…V3…V4…V5 documents (all separate files, mind you) being created for edits, resulting in said feedback being spread across multiple docs.
Good thing Connect now includes True Edit, which allows you to edit files directly in Connect and save changes across all users, resulting in a single source of truth for each and every file.
We thought it’d be nice to make browsing through font collections more engaging, and more helpful, than your typical drop-down scroll-a-thon – so that’s exactly what we’ve done. When you preview a font in Connect, you have four options at your disposal: “Tile,” “QuickType,” “Waterfall,” and “ABC123.”
Tile shows – you guessed it – a small tile for the selected font with a two-character sample of what that font looks like typed out. QuickType displays the font typed out in a full sentence, while Waterfall also displays a full sentence but in four different sizes. ABC123 displays the selected font as a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, and some standard symbols.
While FoundrySearch solves the “new font” problem by allowing you to search across the big wide world of font foundries, sometimes you’re working with a font that isn’t quite right, but is close enough that you want to use it as the basis for a new font search within your own collection. Enter QuickMatch, which helps you find fonts in your libraries that are visually similar to the font you’re already working with or have selected in your library.
Fluctuating markets and inflation have made the cost of getting creative work done hard to predict. It’s more crucial than ever to stay on budget, and you may be surprised by the cost savings when switching from an on-prem server to a cloud-based solution like Connect for the management of fonts and other digital assets. Check out the beaucoup bucks we recently saved a large agency:
Already an established customer of Universal Type Server? We’ll take the wheel and handle your migration to Connect, ensuring that your transition to the cloud is fast and seamless so that you can hit the ground running.
There ya have it. After a lot of reps at the R&D gym (interspersed with long water breaks) we’ve reemerged stronger, and built features that push Connect beyond simple font management into a tool that makes entire projects run smoother from start-to-finish.
We’re proud of this change, as it helps us deliver more collaboration, coordination, and control so you can ensure that fonts don’t hold up – or stop – the growth of your creative business.
Oh yeah, almost forgot – have any interest in getting compliant? Well, we made a whole Compliance HUB if that tickles your fancy. Check it out:
