Thomas “my other car is a sans serif” Phinney on fonts, typography & text. Geeky troubleshooting and info for font developers and users. Consulting & expert witness for fonts & typography.« Font Detective forensic typography assistant needed
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- Hello, Watson!
UPDATE 25 DEC: Just thought I should say that yes I picked someone (out of many highly qualified—or even overqualified—applicants). They are choosing to stay anonymous for now, but have been doing a lovely job so far!
UPDATE 23 NOV: (1) Good lord, I have a lot of applicants. Application deadline will be Nov 24 at 8 am US Pacific time, and yes that is Thanksgiving for us. (2) By “very occasional, part-time work” I mean maybe 3 hours, or 6, or 16, all in a week or two… and then maybe nothing for weeks or even months. This is just an occasional brief gig. Over time it might become more. Or perhaps not. The task of sample clipping is the main thing I have come up with, and will be an ongoing one. It is pretty darn tedious, sorry. (3) Added a couple more details in the body.
This is currently very occasional, part-time work. Many of my cases from my detective work involve things like time consuming fiddly data collection, which I don’t have time to continue doing all by myself. A particular case at hand involves about a dozen documents. To demonstrate what the font is, part of my method involves taking samples of some specific letters (defined by me) from the documents. This amounts to clipping graphic images (from a PDF or image file, via Acrobat or Photoshop) and pasting them into a table (in Word or possibly InDesign). It is pretty rote work. In this case, like most of them, we already know what the typeface is when we go to do this clipping: the problem is to demonstrate that to the court. So, we take these laborious samples and make a pretty chart. And for a particular case at hand, instead of the usual one document and just maybe two, there are many. And a deadline in December.
I have more than a bit too much total work for the rest of this year, so I am looking for somebody to do this task, on this and future cases. Currently I define which characters are worth collecting samples of, but that is something I could potentially hand off in the future. Or perhaps we both pick some.
This could quite possibly lead to other work; it depends on your skills and what you bring to the table. There are times when I could use somebody to research some issue… I would give an example from a current case, but I definitely shouldn’t say it. Sigh.
The work pays well, and I am happy to share some of that.
Email me if you have my email, or just use the comment function to give me your email address and a link to your resume or a description of your background. (I won’t publish these comments!) Obviously some design and typography background is a bonus, but then again, this is also pretty basic, for now. Brains are the most important resource. No promise of growth and advancement, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out!
This will require signing a non-disclosure agreement. I will let you know what you can say about any given case at hand, but it is often nothing, or pretty minimal. Even afterwards, most cases remain largely confidential. The ones we can talk about are a distinct minority.
