fabulous five

friday afternoon, we were scrambling to get several books closed, which was a challenge with a few key people being out of the office. my boss looked at me and said, "you'll do fine," and proceeded to asked little old me to make some changes to the cover of one of our legal guides. and it wasn't just any legal guide, it was a legal guide for landlords in pennsylvania. just so happens my dad is a landlord in pennsylvania. so appropiate for my first interaction with a cover. anyway, there was a "top legal guide for over 20 years!" seal on the cover that needed to be updated, to say "25 years." so, i opened up the seal file in illustrator to quickly change the 0 to a 5, only it didn't turn out to be so quick. whoever'd made this seal had decided to create outlines around the text, meaning it was no longer a font, but a shape. and even though i had to memorize plenty-o-fonts for typography my sophomore year, i was unable to identify the font being used. the solution? i chose a font - happened to be helvetica - that looked similar to the font used. it was a tad too bold, so i created a stroke around it the color of the background to thin it a bit. but then it seemed too tilty, so i straightened out the top portion of the five a bit and voila, it was perfect. and as silly as replacing a 0 with a 5 sounds... this was the highlight of my week.