Chathini Uduwana Regional Manager Sri Lanka, Typefi
At Typefi, we believe in the importance of doing our bit for others. Every year, our Colombo team works on a Corporate Responsibility Project to give back to the Sri Lankan community—last year we organised and donated school supplies to 55 school children at Weragala Primary School, and this year we decided to support families in another disadvantaged community.
We have the most beautiful and untouched beaches on the East Coast of Sri Lanka. My husband and I visit the East Coast every year as a ritual, taking the opportunity to breathe in the smell of salt, feel fresh sand under our feet, and experience the local food and culture.
It was during these yearly trips we began to notice small children selling things on the roadside, clearly suffering from hunger. There were many primary school age kids in school uniforms, selling fish or vegetables. Sri Lanka has almost a 92% literacy rate, one of the highest in Asia, and it’s even higher in younger demographics.
Children in Maa Oya.
But while education is free, it can be difficult for many to put food on the table to support their children’s physical growth and development.
10 Typefi team members lay out their InDesign memories and tips.
Morgaine Auton Marketing Assistant, Typefi
1999 was a big year. President Clinton was acquitted, The Matrix premiered in cinemas across the globe, Napster pioneered peer-to-peer file sharing, and the Y2K bug was still capturing the public zeitgeist.
Perhaps most significantly for us here at Typefi, and for many people working in publishing around the world, the first version of Adobe InDesign was released in August of that year.
Birthday cupcakes at CreativePro Week 2019.
Called InDesign 1.0, the 1999 version was created as a replacement for Adobe’s retiring desktop software, Adobe PageMaker, which was struggling to compete with QuarkXPress, the leading desktop publishing software at the time.
The release of the OS X compatible InDesign 2.0 in 2002 made it the first desktop publishing software in the space, helping cinch its position as an industry standard amongst Apple users in the creative industries.
It is a curious thing, publishing books. I’ve never been sure if it is more art or science; either way, there is no doubt that both are involved, and one without the other amounts to naught.
Access to literature has come a long way since early handwritten manuscripts, thanks to moveable type and the printing press, largely attributed to Johannes Gutenberg. The “technology” Gutenberg leveraged was his own trade of blacksmithing. This is as far from being a scribe as you could imagine—metal versus paper, a loud, hot workshop versus the quiet library environment.
The printing press—an early industry disruptor!
It is unknown how or why Gutenberg formalised the concept of moveable type and the printing press, but it is an early example of “disruption” by someone “outside of the business”.
Attempting to combat a culture of overworking and burnout, the company implemented a four-day working week, and productivity boomed. Employees were also encouraged to have fewer meetings, set a half-hour time cap, and limit meetings to a maximum of five people.
This Typefi meeting has more than five people. So inefficient!
Not only did employees have more efficient meetings and take less time off, but costs declined, and 92% of workers said they preferred the change. Productivity skyrocketed by a whopping 40%, while the offices used 23% less electricity and 59% fewer print pages.
