Optical illusion design

Had a good day at work today! My co-worker improved a design I had started while I was on vacation and did a terrific job of it, too. I was happy to see my original--hastily put together--design for a brochure basically still there but noticeably improved. He also created other material related to the brochure in the same style. One of the things I liked that he did was to have an optical illusion for the headlines like this:



The effect on the printout was more extreme, but the idea is that the lower parts of the letters look darker than the top parts. Since this design will be one we will update each month (it's for a new event each time, so the layout stays the same but all the content changes), I was worried when I saw this! I thought that I would have to create the two-tone letter effect each time in Illustrator :-) But it's actually just a trick of the eye. So it's easy to do and looks really neat. I'm sure the client will be impressed, too.

So I've been thinking about changing how I do font distribution at Scooter Graphics. I'm thinking that perhaps it would be better to e-mail the registered versions of fonts to people rather than making them download it from the web site. Font files are pretty tiny, especially so with OpenType, so I think that this might be easier for folks. They also wouldn't have to worry about password-protected zip files (some people have a little trouble with those in Windows), since the font will just be there as a file in the e-mail.

However, this will mean that either Kagi or I will have to do the e-mailing. I'm thinking that Kagi won't do fulfillment without charging me extra--and I'd like to avoid that. Another idea might be adopting PayPal as a payment option. That has some interesting possibilities, too!

In the end, I would rather adopt a solution that makes things simpler for customers than one that confuses them.