Blooming Elegant

[homespuncottage]

First of all, thank you Zazzle for listening to our suggestions. I have noticed the new fonts and I'm very excited, to see the additional script fonts, however, I don't see Blooming Elegant script or the other Blooming Elegant font on the list. I did go to a product on the marketplace where the designer had used the font and it did indicate in the design tool that it was blooming elegant but I don't see it as a selection in the fonts available. My question is will this cause a problem with designs that have already been made and will blooming elegant be back because although it's over used, I do like the glyphs that can be added. Thank you again for all that you do. I hope I'm not just missing something, I did check several times for the missing fonts. 

Beverly 

[DesignerOne]

In their email they had said something like

“But not to worry about the removal part; we have already anticipated and will be transitioning the designs for you automatically for as many designs as possible. And if the automagic doesn't meet your needs, you will have product edit access to make any changes needed.”

It doesn’t seem like they fully grasp that retiring fonts would greatly affect hundreds and thousands of already published designs. We designers are not here writing essays on a word document where changing a font from Times New Roman to Garamond is inconsequential. The FONTs we selected to use are very much a part of the design. When we choose a font it is because the selected font works very well with the rest of the other elements in the design, you can’t simply do a switcheroo with fonts, that would throw off the entire design. 

[Deb]

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@DesignerOne wrote:

In their email they had said something like

“But not to worry about the removal part; we have already anticipated and will be transitioning the designs for you automatically for as many designs as possible. And if the automagic doesn't meet your needs, you will have product edit access to make any changes needed.”

The FONTs we selected to use are very much a part of the design. When we choose a font it is because the selected font works very well with the rest of the other elements in the design, you can’t simply do a switcheroo with fonts, that would throw off the entire design. 

They obviously have NO Clue how much work this would be to go through and change literally thousands of products  chasing down a problem that was an un-needed problem.

Here is a sample of how the simple  change of font from Blooming elegant sans to their new dongle - the new font is smaller, has no auto caps and the line spacing is  much winder - messing up  the entire template

In addition, if they are going to make new classification categories, they need to also place all fonts with swashes in one category so we don't have to go searching them out.

[DesignerOne]

Exactly. Just wrote a reply on the second page where I compared the FONT SIZE and attributes like TRACKING and LEADING for both Morgana and Dongle to Blooming and it’s bad.

Them adding the 80+ script fonts also seem like some magician’s misdirection. It’s like “Look here at the new fonts we’re adding” and while a lot of designers are momentarily entranced by the pretty new things, Zazzle’s retiring a popular major font that is going mess up hundreds and thousands of already published products.

[Cat]

Several folks have commented that the replacement took these sorts of issues into account. I can't verify that since I haven't found any of mine that have been replaced yet - but maybe, hopefully it won't be as devastating as it feels? I don't much like the look of Dongle - it has a "comic sans" look that I don't really like, but that may be the least of the issues, we'll see.

I know for sure that a one-to-one replacement of Blooming Elegant Script with swashes to Morgana (which is the reported replacement) has both sizing and special character issues, but supposedly they took those things into account. I'm in the "will believe it when I see it" camp on this one - I also don't much like the angles of the swashes in Morgana, they have a bit of a wonky look with the leading swash angling down and the trailing swash angling up. I'm thanking my lucky stars that I've only used it on a handful of designs unlike some folks. Sure hoping they'll let us fix designs that get messed up in the transition, but honestly, the amount of work that will be... makes me feel ill. 

And don't EVEN get me started on my Word Art stuff using the Sugar Plums Symbols - I'm already prepared to just delete all of those collections. Sigh.

[JB]

I'm late noticing the changes and I am so frustrated. Exhausted by even the thought of having to go through all my designs and stores to find all the ruined designs. Fonts are such an integral part of design and planning a design doesn't mean we just plop any old font in and call it done. This was not fair. I dont understand why not renew the licensing for this font family instead of causing this mountain of issues for products and designers.

[Cat]

Blooming Elegant is still there. It's listed under "handwriting & calligraphy" not under "script." I haven't seen any new fonts though.

[Marcia]

I seriously HOPE it is. It's on most of my best sellers. I am so screwed if Zazzle does away with this font, new automatically substituted fonts, or not. (I haven't seen any of the new fonts yet, either.)

[Deb]

Marcia - Here are the fonts Mark posted -

[CrazyMermaid]

I don't see Blooming Elegant listed under All fonts or Handwriting and Calligraphy. However, it is still showing on products. It could be that the font listings are still migrating to their new home.

[homespuncottage]

@CrazyMermaid I noticed that too. It is listed if a design used it, but not on the list to design, so hopefully the system will keep it on our products that are already designed. Thank you for responding to my post.

[homespuncottage]

Hi Cat. I wonder if your browser is cookie-ing (I never know how to spell that). The new fonts are listed. 

[KeegansCreation]

Booming Elegant is no longer under "handwriting +calligraphy" (or in "all fonts") so they must be doing a rolling rollout. I just got the new ones today. 

In addition to new script fonts (of which there are many), they did a re-org of the existing fonts. There are now two new categories: sci fi and vintage+retro. Neither has new fonts. It's just a re-org. Sci fi has Sonic and Orbit (obvious choices) but also some that were previously in Sans Serif, like Prima Bold. Vintage Retro has what you would expect: Cloister (medieval), Guest Check (1920's), Daddy O Hip (1950's) etc. Symbols has been whittled down to two fonts; the zodiac one and the symbol one (@, % etc.). Woe unto anybody who was using the others (unless they get frozen in place where they are on the design) because there is no similar font.

[kristenj]

Ugh. Can you see if Blooming Elegant Sans (the all-caps) is still available? That's my most used for holiday card family names and invitation details, so I'm pretty worried about it. (Whatever is being rolled out today hasn't made its way to me just yet.)

[kristenj]

Nevermind. I see the update now and it is indeed gone. 

[Marcia]

What about the products that you've previously made with the font? Is it still on them?

[kristenj]

It is -- thousands and thousands. I can edit text on existing products that use Blooming Elegant Sans, and publish with it, but can't select it when creating new text. Really need to know what the next steps are here, because there's no other comparable all-caps sans serif in the font library. If it gets "auto migrated" to something, I'm very concerned about the potential outcome. The communication on this was poor. This wasn't exactly an obscure/rarely used font family.

[Marcia]

That's good to know. I'm not freaking out quite as much now. There's at least a couple thousand product for me, as well. I'm shocked that they did away with this font, since it was so popular AND they didn't replace it with something equivalent!!! I know it was way overused – I'm certainly guilty of that – but that was because it was the only font like that that had swashes. I was under the impression, for some reason, that the new fonts would replace unpopular ones.

Can a moderator comment on this, please???

[DesignerOne]

There’s been multiple threads since the font announcement asking moderators for a retired font list (this should have been a simple thing to provide) or for a way to filter affected products and yet it seems NONE of them have been replied to. 

Auto-migrating to fonts that they choose is a terrible idea. Who are they to decide what font works (with the rest of the elements) on our designs? And us not having a way to know which of our hundreds and thousands of designs are affected by the retired fonts (and possible auto migration) is worst. Retiring fonts (some very popular ones) is bad enough, auto-migrating is going to be a colossal disaster when we have re-edit every single one.

Right now we only know of Blooming, there are probably others to come.

[CreativeLeahG]

I had hoped star performers like yourself were part of the consultation process (gave me hope re the 'automated changes' that might be heading our way regarding retired fonts), it disappoints me greatly this has not been the case 😞

I have raised my concerns via forum and email, editing several thousand items and even finding the ones with issues isn't an option for many of us.

[CrazyMermaid]

Blooming elegant is still on my products, just not in the listing. I think it just needs time. 

[homespuncottage]

Hi @kristenj I feel your pain. I used Blooming Elegant Sans constantly. 

[Cat]

I still have it, but I don't have any new fonts either. I'm REALLY hoping that it's just a mistake or something that's lost in re-organizing the fonts, because it would be colossally stupid to do away with probably THE most popular font in the marketplace - at least for wedding designs. Why would Zazzle shoot themselves in the foot that way? It doesn't make sense.

[LMGildersleeve]

It takes time for everyone to see the new fonts. It's not like they can flip a switch and everything changes automatically. You'll see them soon enough. ☺️

[Cat]

Well, it's updated now. This is a disaster! I'm crossing my fingers that they're gonna grandfather in existing designs because I literally have THOUSANDS of products that will be impacted. I feel like crying.

[CrazyMermaid · Accepted solution]

It isn't a disaster. It will be alright. Give it an hour or so to setting down. So far my products look fine!

[Connie]

Morgana is a good substitute for Blooming Elegant Script. You can hardly even notice the difference, and it has universal tails, so everything is fine there. But unless the change all our text to all caps before switching to Dongle, that WILL be a disaster! I chose B.E.Sans specifically for being all caps, so that I didn't have to type everything in all caps. The lower case of Dongle is HORRID!!!!

[Cat]

For me, it's going to depend on which of the Morgana swashes they choose as replacements. I've been playing with the font this morning and there are a TON of options, which is good, but some of them go off at really wonky angles which won't work for the designs where I've got BE swashes. We'll see. I'm less worried about those than the symbol fonts which I've used extensively. Still waiting to see what they do about those.

[Marcia]

@Cat how are you seeing the different Morgana swash options? (I know, probably a stupid question...)

[Cat]

@Marcia All of the special characters or "glyphs" as they call them are stored in what's called the "private use" section of the unicode character chart (like ASCII, only it's the stuff that's beyond the section that's regularly used for standard characters.) The private use area includes characters E000 through F8FF.

The problem is that the author of the font can put literally ANYTHING into those characters, or nothing at all, and you can't see what's in them unless you have the font installed on your system and a special character chart program of some sort to view them.

Soooo, the only way I know to play with them on Zazzle is to go find a unicode character chart (I use this one: https://jrgraphix.net/r/Unicode/E000-F8FF) and then copy each character (by "character" I mean the little hollow square or rectangle) one at a time and paste it into a text field in the Zazzle design tool to see what, if anything, is in there. 

It's hit and miss, and a real pain in the arse, but it works. When I find something that I like, I generally save it on a hidden product so I can find it again. If you were REALLY ambitious you could do like Viviendules did and create your own special character charts for each font, but that seems like a huge amount of work to me.

As I mentioned somewhere in this enormously long thread, usually when you purchase a font it comes with a PDF file that includes all of the glyph characters so you can see them and simply copy/paste them into your work. Sometimes you can find that PDF file on the web if you've got better Googling skills than I possess, but Zazzle should have a copy (assuming the author of the font made one, which is not always the case.) Anyhow, if you can get your hands on that PDF somehow, it would make the process much easier.

[Marcia]

@Cat thanks so much for that explanation. I think I'll try the character chart from your link just to see. If I find anything good for Everglow, I'll let everyone here know.

[Cat]

@Marcia I'm not sure why I didn't think of this before, but if you open one of the charts that @WHS_Designs posted (I chose Elizabeth because it had the most characters https://www.zazzle.com/ellizabeth_font_ligatures_chart-228133570572681441) and then just select all of the Elizabeth text and change the font to Morgana or whichever you want to look at, you should be able to see at least most of the special characters. That would certainly save work over searching through them one character at a time like I've been doing!

[WHS_Designs]

guess what I'm in the middle of doing. 🙂

[Cat]

Great minds think alike... 😊 Well, your mind obviously thought of it before mine did, so perhaps some minds think quicker than others! 🙄

[Marcia]

Oh wow – thank you! I'll try that when I want to check out additional fonts!

[JB]

You can just open the opentype glyph panel in Adobe if you have it and see all the opentype characters in fonts.

[Marcia]

Ok, I got lucky and found what I was looking for right away, as well as some other options. The following works for Everglow, but these blocks are also swashes for Morgana. Hopefully you can just copy the rectangles & paste from here. Otherwise, use the numbers to the right of each rectangle & Cat's chart link above.

 E007

 E008

 E009

 E00A

 E00C

 E00D

 E00E

 E00F

 E010

 E011

Hope this helps!

[Cat]

copy/pasting the rectangles worked!!

[homespuncottage]

I feel so stupid, but I googled for hours last night. I see the ligatures for Elizabeth that were kindly posted but what rectangles? How do I get them to paste into the design tool? I even downloaded fontlab which does give me unicodes but how do I translate them?

[Laura]

Here's a chart I created a few years back and set to direct only (was based on Vivendulies tips). You can select all the characters (the grid is locked), then change the font to see what's available, double click to edit the text, then copy and paste the character (box) you want. 

https://www.zazzle.com/swashes_glyphs_template_by_purple_cat_art_design-256033838545838461

ETA: I see very few fonts that are quite extensive and go beyond the size of my chart so an update will be needed for the complete set.