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Triskele Moon Studios

My wife, Leanne, is the guiding hand, head, heart and soul of Triskele Moon Studios. She turns out exquisite jewelry day after day, all of it one of a kind and individually created without the aid of assistants or machinery. The Studios have been running for nearly three years now, and she’s managed to make it her full-time job. I couldn’t be prouder of her or of what she’s done.

This past weekend saw a lot of work. While we normally sell to local shops, on Friday she had her first ever art gallery opening in Lakeside, Michigan. While I’ll let her tell most of the story on her own site, the real story for me is that we got the kick in the pants we needed to set up said site.

Triskelemoon.com is now open as an informational site for anyone interested in the art of fine jewelry design. The online store is not quite ready for prime time, but I’ll be sure to post a note when it is. In the meantime, I’m focusing on adding the little graphic touches that make a site more attractive and user-friendly over the next week or so. Keep checking back to learn more about the jewelry and to see how a graphic site evolves over time.

Tricky software companies …

I’ve been trying to get some work done this morning on invitations to my wife’s upcoming jewelry show on the 14th, and ran into an issue early on.

She wants to use some holiday stationary from Gartner Studios. That’s fine, as far as it goes; but as is so common with preprinted materials, the Web site only provides templates for Microsoft Word – not any actual graphics software. I’ve had problems previously with Avery doing the same thing with their business cards. Who uses Word for design work? At any rate, in a misguided effort to save some time (and get to the Xbox before dinnertime), I decided to use the template anyway.

Triskele moon Studios I designed her company nameplate (to the left) using the Trajan Pro font. Now, Trajan comes free with the Adobe Creative Suite, but when I opened the Gartner templates the font was nowhere to be found. I opened up Illustrator and there it sat, smug and pleased as a squirrel in the Planter’s factory. Back to Word – nothing, no go. Then I remembered something I’d seen a while back, and went looking in the directory of the computer.

When Adobe CS loads these fonts, it does so in a directory called /Common Files/Adobe/Fonts/, not the actual Windows fonts directory. A sneaky little trick that basically renders the fonts invisible to any software not native to the company which provided the font. Fortunately, all you need to do is copy those font files into the Windows fonts directory and you’re golden, but it still ate up an extra hour that I could’ve used sneaking into the Temple of the Hammerites.

Ah, well. I guess I’ll just push bedtime back an hour.

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