Now where did I put that manual!

MartinShepherdly — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:31:24 +0000

I know that I speak for my fellow man (as in ‘male’) when I say that generally instruction manuals are there for when things go wrong – and then only as a last resort when you’ve spent a good couple of hours stubbornly trying to figure it out for yourself.
I’m thinking here of manuals for the huge number of technical appliances that now dominate our working and domestic lives. As a video business of course we probably acquire more than most, with all the shiny Japanese electronics and gizmos that are occupational hazards. Sometimes the equipment store in the office looks more like the shop window of Dixon’s (they don’t exist any more do they?) with all the video decks and DVD players of varying formats. And my young daughters are often marvelling at the multiple arrays of screens that seem to keep appearing whenever they visit the office. (Hint: if you like LCD screens get into video editing… you always have at least two on your desk!)

Anyway, back to the point… the ‘user manual’; how often does it happen when you finally realise you need to refer to the manual that you cannot find it. Is it in the box? Is it in the filing cabinet? Did it get thrown away with the box? And even if you can find it, the chances are it is the Greek version!

Today I had this self same problem when I couldn’t get one of our video decks to do what I wanted it to do. Of course, the manual was not where it should have been. So what did I do? Well, I did what any self respecting male who, when finally resorting to the manual and cannot find it does and turned to the great Google. Low and behold it led me to TV.ManualsOnline.com

This is fantastic! They have available – for free! – all kinds of user manuals in PDF format; all searchable and listed by manufacturer.

Not only that they are part of The OwnerIQ Network whose stated goal is…
“to make it easy and hassle-free to find the user manuals for the many products you own.”

What an honourable ambition!
They seem to have sites for everything from air-conditioning units, white goods, digital cameras, portable media, audio, car audio, TVs of all types… they’ve got everything… its the Harrod’s of user manuals!

And the really neat thing is it saves the manuals you need on-line in your own ‘electronic filing cabinet’ so you need never lose a manual again!

I feel reborn!

What the Font!

MartinShepherdly — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:41:40 +0000

Have you ever been in that position where you need to know what particular font a client uses in their logo and communications?

It often happens for us when creating titles and captions and we need them to be consistent with the client’s website where the video is going to be shown. Very often the client doesn’t know and you need a quick answer. Jonathan Schofield of Watershed Creative (Designer of this site) drew my attention a while back to WhatTheFont. This clever little tool allows you to upload an image of the logo or type style either from your local computer or to point to an image url on a website and gives you a listing of the fonts it is likely to be. Very simple, quick and normally gets you pretty close to the actual font. Here is an example of whatthefont returned when I uploaded the logo of The Wow Company who we shot some video testimonials for yesterday.

Web Epics - UK » Useful web tools

Now where did I put that manual!

What the Font!