Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford, which furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
The Global Academic Business publishes books, journals, and digital resources for the research, professional, and higher education markets. We are an award winning global Design team with staff located in Oxford, New York, Toronto, and Delhi. Our projects are diverse and intellectually rewarding. We work independently and collaboratively in a stimulating intellectual environment.
About the role
We are seeking a Fonts Specialist to work closely with the Creative Director and the book design team to ensure elegant and accurate typographic rendering of our varied Academic content in print and digital environments.
Key responsibilities include:
• Specialized typographic knowledge: an emphasis on understanding of non-standard character requirements in ancient languages, linguistics, and science. • Font and permissions knowledge: understanding Font End User License Agreements and influencing the Press’ interpretation and implementation of them. • Digital and ebooks: collaborating with various stakeholder groups, including third-party suppliers, to establish processes and best practices to ensure font legal compliance in digital products/ebooks. • Supplier management: identifying appropriate suppliers to source fonts or font development/creation to meets OUP requirements. Working with pre-press suppliers to ensure font compliance throughout the workflow. • Text design: designing and modifying text design specifications to ensure fonts used are compliant and meet content needs.
About you
You: Love typography! Have elite typographic skill. You understand the typographic issues related to setting world class scholarly content in areas as diverse as Ancient languages, linguistics, and science, and love coming up with effective solutions.
Ideally you will have:
• Degree-level qualification (or equivalent) in Graphic Design, with a specialism in Typography • Excellent knowledge of design software on Apple MAC including InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, plus Standard Office software (MAC/PC) • Experience in text design and writing text specifications • Ebook experience a plus • Ability to teach/mentor, and /or train new and inexperienced staff as well as key stakeholders in Editorial, Marketing etc. • Excellent communications skills, cultural literacy, and ability to work well with other functions in large organization • Experience in developing processes and implementing them • Able to project manage and pro-actively progress team initiatives/projects to conclusion and on schedule.
This is a lot more than a type director position. Understanding of Unicode and OpenType text processing is important, as well as the licensing component.
I've been doing some consulting on font-related things for OUP in recent months, but they really need somebody full-time.
Hello all. I finally got around to summarising this role as a brief case study. I wanted to share the original business case for the role, because this is pertinent to licensors.
The Fonts Specialist role was recruited in response to an identified business risk, where the Academic Division didn’t have sufficient in-house knowledge or mature internal structures and procedures to manage this risk effectively.
The role at Oxford University Press is not the only dedicated font management role that has disappeared in recent years. There were never that many, as far as we know.
Thank you to everyone on TypeDrawers, Alphabettes, Unicode, W3C, Script Encoding Initiative (and many others via email or face-to-face) who offered help and solutions for licensing concerns and tricky content needs (hieroglyphs, ancient Athenian inscriptions, typography for dyslexia, classical Chinese, musical notation, Myanmar, and much more). It was thrilling, eye-opening and enjoyable. The authors were very thankful, it made a huge difference for them.
This thread is about the job posting at OUP. If people want to discus the typography of the press’s offerings, that would be a different thread.
To my memory about 3 to 5 postings have been deleted, without any prior warning. I find this very odd and I see such a measure happen for the first time. I remember, when a discussion drifted aside, in the past, a moderator would have the loose end of it parted and made it the begin of a new thread.
Discussions always go here and there, more or less.
Is it the new TD policy to be so rigid upon it and to rule conversations with a knife?
I don’t want to continue to derail this thread but I’ll give a quick explainer: The posts were deleted due to complaints filed by forum members regarding the behavior of a poster.
It’s one think for a natural shift in topic over the course of a conversation. Derailing a thread with attacks is another.
As far as I recollect, @konrad ritter levelled a typographic critique of the Oxford Handbooks. Albeit somewhat harshly executed, I believe it was written in good faith.
Comments
Text of the ad, for posterity:
Apparantly, most EULA's are still not understandable for the layman...
I've been doing some consulting on font-related things for OUP in recent months, but they really need somebody full-time.
The role at Oxford University Press is not the only dedicated font management role that has disappeared in recent years. There were never that many, as far as we know.
Thank you to everyone on TypeDrawers, Alphabettes, Unicode, W3C, Script Encoding Initiative (and many others via email or face-to-face) who offered help and solutions for licensing concerns and tricky content needs (hieroglyphs, ancient Athenian inscriptions, typography for dyslexia, classical Chinese, musical notation, Myanmar, and much more). It was thrilling, eye-opening and enjoyable. The authors were very thankful, it made a huge difference for them.
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/53742/#Comment_53742
(Noting that no post can ever be 100% on-topic, and the degree and duration of off-topic discussions are what do more harm than good.)
Yes, moderating is hard work, and generally thankless. So: thank you for working so hard... just please don't over-compensate.
As far as I recollect, @konrad ritter levelled a typographic critique of the Oxford Handbooks. Albeit somewhat harshly executed, I believe it was written in good faith.