A little announcement...

Well, I'm back for yet another stunning installation of, Jacot's weird and wild mind. Well maybe not weird, or wild, maybe if I did a blog post while drinking... nah nothing good could come from that.

Anywho, I don't have much in the way of PC maintenance tips this week. I was straining my brain to think what else could be useful. I couldn't think of much for the general PC user so I thought of something for the graphic designer or digital typesetter. Two words, Font management.

If you've every dabbled in design work on the computer you've probably taken advantage of the thousands of free fonts online. When you have thousands of fonts installed on your computer it can bog down your design software. I found this out the hard way when Adobe Illustrator was shutting down due to lack of free memory. At the time I had 1400 fonts installed on my computer 1350 of them I never use but they looked cool so someday I might want to use them. I had been wanting to trim the fonts on my computer for a long time but didn't want to spend the hours it would have taken to go through the font folder having to open each font and determine whether I needed it or not. One day I decided to look online for font management software and was blown away by what I found. NexusFont is a free font management tool that does everything I need. This program allows you to see installed fonts on your PC, fonts in different folders, see what the phrase or word looks like in different fonts, and much more. I was able to get my font addiction under control easily and even manage fonts on the fly while doing some graphic design work. If you are a person who works with type/fonts this program is indispensible and highly recommended. The website can be found here.

Now onto the announcement I promised last week...

Recently Ryan Claytor, a good friend and one of the hardest working people in the indy comics scene, stopped by to drop off poster tubes to mail out MSU Comics Forum posters to various comics retailers. During the visit Ryan proposed a challenge, one that I feel was sorely needed. You see, Ryan is posting a page a week of his new And Then One Day comic on his website for the first 24 weeks of 2011. He challenged me to do the same here on my blog. Well not post his comic pages on my blog but post my own sequential pages. It was a challenge I was glad to accept. Now the only problem is which project to put on that time frame. So many to choose and yet so many started and left unfinished. I couldn't choose what to do so I did the only logical thing at that time. I went to bed.

The next day, while sitting at work, I made a decision. It's time to get The Tao of Snarky of the back burner and get it cooking again. Brad DeMaagd and I have been working with a script for quite some time but there was always something missing. With the decision to break it out the answers came to me easily.

So, for the next 24 weeks I'll be posting a page a week of The Tao of Snarky: The Cutting Edge every Tuesday night at 9:00pm. After that I'll probably take a few weeks break and start the second installment with weekly posts, then a break, then third installment, then a... you get the point. Now this will be part of my weekly blog post, it will not replace it but be in addition to the weekly blog. So for those who look forward to the weekly helping of... me, you shall still get it.

In light of this development I thought I would share an old image of Snarky from back in the day...

I've always enjoyed this image, it was one of the first times I used Copic markers and was blown away by what was possible with them. Oops almost forgot, In case case you've never read Snarky or know what The Tao of Snarky is check out the first 4 page introduction into the world here. You'll get strong feeling of the character and it should prepare you well for the weekly posts.

In case you're still reading I'll sum The Tao of Snarky up like this:

"The Tao of Snarky is a futuristic film noir detective story. Snarky's searching the Galaxy for his sister and is stuck on the alien planet of Rex-9. Snarky's a Galactic Private Detective, the only problem with him being on Rex-9, he's human. Snarky's going to be taking the case of a missing talisman that may cause the destruction of a major family of the indigenous species on Rex-9. While on the case he's caught in a moral dilema, solve the case or live to talk about it. Snarky's going to find out what what it means to live on "The Cutting Edge""

Well I'll see everyone back here next week for page 1 of 24.

Wish me luck,

-Jacot