A recent post on Creative Bits (and the subsequent commentary underneath) got me thinking about what might be required to refer to oneself as a 'graphic designer'. Is it a college degree, a kick-ass portfolio, or is it simply because you've printed the flyer for the local church's fish dinner on your home inkjet for the last 10 years running...?

There's a commercial that appears on TV in my neck of the woods for a local trade school called Gibbs College, and it manages to make my blood boil most every time. Not only because of the deafening audio levels at which all cable ads seem to run at, but because it also seems to cheapen what I do for a living.

For those of you who've managed your font library with some earlier version of the program already, FAP4 doesn't necessarily reinvent the wheel - it does, however, tack on some spiffy new features and makes auto-activation that much more reliable. Let's run down the new stuff as Inside Software displays it on their web site, shall we? (my comments & screenshots following):

In my line of work, it's all about deadlines and how fast you can meet them – that's why whenever I can streamline my workflow, you bet I'll do it. I'm all about Transmit 'droplets', 'Watched Folders' and most importantly, I love my print presets in Adobe InDesign.

Since I'm constantly printing drafts of documents for editors to review, I required a way to quickly output those jobs with certain specs on specific printers without having to configure those variables every single time in the Print menu.

(Forgive me if you've seen this info before in a message board post by yours truly)

About a year or so ago I was experiencing a strange occurrence in regards to InDesign's built-in Preflight/Package feature - normally I'd select the item from the menu and the dialog box would appear with all the pertaining options:

But sometimes I'd be all set to get a file out the door, select 'Preflight' and nothing would happen. Well, 'nothing' unless you're not counting the endless spinning of OSX's 'beachball'. No preflight box, no error message, nada - the whole program would simply lock up and I would have to Force-Quit & start over. This is not nearly as aggravating as it was under any OS prior to 10 or in most early versions of Quark. Adobe's wonderful little autosave/crash recovery function has saved my bacon more than a few times these past few years.