A key driver behind the redesign of voice of sandiego.org is Ashley Pingree Lewis, a freelance graphic designer who donated her services through her business Dog Beach Design. You have seen Ashley’s work before because she’s a regular contributor of graphics and cartoons to the site.

I wanted to find out a little more about the thinking behind her redesign, and she agreed to answer some questions in email. I have lightly edited her answers.

Scott (Lewis) and Andy (Donohue) by now had a pretty clear vision for the basic residence page layout and had ideas about what meticulous elements were vital and where certain possessions needed to be. I digested all their ideas and formed a basic sketch of that framework on paper. With that as my guide, they set me wobbly to design a wholly new home page. I was free aesthetically to develop the styling, the look and the feel of the original site. I pressed the pixels around in Photo shop, and came up with a replicate to present to the staff. With every change that I offered we thought of new possessions we wanted to do. After seven or eight revisions I had the complete mock-up ready to give to Town News so they could actually build the thing.

Fontographer has been almost completely rewritten, with new features, a new look, and new compatibility. The new design is intended at making life easier for the graphic designer and desktop publisher, who are persistently under pressure to do more in less time. In this streak, the GUI has been modernized, but functionality like keyboard shortcuts and menu choices have not been changed, so that the learning arch for the new version is short for those already familiar with the product. Similarly, a lot goes on under the top of Fontographer through automatic defaults, eliminating baffling and time-wasting decisions about technical aspects like encodings and formats. Yet the choices are there if the user needs them.

Our work on Fontographer 5 was like a renovation of a classic car. We have kept the familiar, stylish body that users love, giving it just a restrained facelift. And then, we have replaced the old inefficient engine by modern cutting-edge technology. FOG 5 looks smooth and simple, but it rocks hard, said Adam Twardoch, Font lab Ltd. product and marketing manager.

Twardoch went on to say The beauty of Fontographer is that it allows you to ponder on the ingenious process of designing a print, without being diverted by the technical aspects of font making. FOG users always cherished the speed, ease and exactness in which they could draw Bezier outlines in the product so we have kept the drawing tools and implemented some long-standing facet requests such as a larger zoom level and outline ant aliasing. On the other hand, setting technical font parameters such as font naming or line spacing in Fontographer used to be awkward and did not consider recent developments such as Open Type so we have redesigned those aspects from grate with the goal of making them as easy to use as the rest of the product.