Job: Oxford University Press, "We are seeking a Fonts Specialist"
Comments
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Contemporary equivalent of Type Director?1
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Yes, but without the three-martini lunches, so I suppose it's a lowercase "d." What's the world come to?1
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Text of the ad, for posterity:
Fonts Specialist/Senior Designer
About us
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.
Salary: Competitive salary
Recruiter contact details: Claire Schmid claire.schmid@oup.com
Closing date: 01/02/20150 -
Note the part where it says: "Font and permissions knowledge: understanding Font End User License Agreements"
Apparantly, most EULA's are still not understandable for the layman...2 -
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.
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Well yes, one would expect today’s type director to know Unicode, OpenType and licensing!1
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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 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.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.
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.
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Hello Katy,sorry, but I seem to fail to grasp whatyour recent posting is about …??cheers, A. St.
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It is about the job OUP offered six years ago. Follow the ‘case study’ link.1
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@Katy Mawhood Thank you for the summary!0
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This thread has been cleaned up. Please keep it on topic.0
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James Hultquist-Todd said:This thread has been cleaned up. Please keep it on topic.what means “cleaned up”? – it seems (by now) that several of the recent contributions to this thread have been … just erased?Why?1
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@Andreas Stötzner Good question, especially when Katy was doing a commendable job calmly and articulately defending.0
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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.2
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@James Hultquist-Todd Or maybe as @Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.) opined the OP should be the primary arbiter of how on-topic things should stay:
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.)0 -
James Hultquist-Todd said: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?2
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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.2
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@James Hultquist-Todd But check out who hit Agree on the previous post... Maybe she should have more say than shadowy vigilantes.
Yes, moderating is hard work, and generally thankless. So: thank you for working so hard... just please don't over-compensate.0 -
Did you intervene and delete a couple of postings because of a single member’s impolite behaviour or because it “went off-topic” ?!James Hultquist-Todd said:… The posts were deleted due to complaints filed by forum members regarding the behavior of a poster.
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@James Hultquist-Todd
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.
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@Katy Mawhood May others be inspired by your strength of character.-1
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