Sabtu, 20 April 2013

Top 30 typography apps for iPhone and iPad

Boost your skills and knowledge, create typefaces and play font-related games with these brilliant typography apps for Apple devices.

The whole 'iOS devices are just for consumption' ship sailed long ago, and it was then gleefully wiped from existence as soon as forward-thinking creative types started using iPhones to illustrate covers for the New Yorker, or iPads as an integral part of music gigs. This, of course, is the main strength of Apple's devices: the ecosystem. Rival brands may have more power or various extra slots and ports, but that counts for nothing if you don’t have useful apps.
But when people think about creativity, they cite examples like those we mentioned: illustration and music. Alternatively, aficionados talk about photography, writing and even programming or web design on iOS devices. Few consider typographers the world over, sitting there with big eyes, sniffling slightly and quietly mumbling: "What about us?"
So this one's for you: 30 essential typefaces and fonts apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch that can make your type-oriented life a little easier and in some cases a lot more fun.
  • Read all our iPad articles here, our iPhone articles here, and our typography articles here

01. Ampergram

Typography apps
Combining typography with popular photo editor Instagram led Phillip Pastore to create Ampergram, a cool app that enables you to create endless typographic compositions using cool photos of fonts. You can capture and tag your own letters, or use the app's already stellar offerings generated by the community.
  • Works with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
  • Developer: Clamp Studios LLC
  • Price: $1.99/£1.49
  • Buy in US
  • Buy in UK

02. Typecast

Typography apps
Typecast is a browser-based web fonts app that enables you to experiment with over 23,000 web fonts from Typekit, Fontdeck, Fonts.com and Google Fonts - even if you don't have an account with those services.

03. Typography

Typography apps
Send your own, unique typography message to friends and loved ones with this Typography Kicks Ass. The unique app uses a random set of letters published on Flickr to display the message you input, which can then be emailed to a recipient. Each image is linked to the respective Flickr page, with photo credits visible when rolling over the image.
  • Works with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
  • Developer: Patrick Goor
  • Price: $0.99/£0.69
  • Buy in US
  • Buy in UK

04. Fonts

Typography apps
Despite its incredibly unimaginitive name, Fonts helpfully displays all of the iPhone's system fonts. The initial list is the font families, then each font (normal, bold, oblique) within the family and finally, details about each.

05. A+ Signature

Typography apps
Make your mark on your photos with multi-usage photo annotation app A+ Signature. With an impressive selection of fonts to choose from, this app can do various things, ranging from creating nifty photocards to send to friends and family, to putting your signature on a photo.

06. Over

While a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes you need some words as well to let people know what they're looking at. The iPhone app Over is the perfect choice for any Instagram addict, enabling you to add typography to your images quickly and easily.

07. Overgram

  
Just an example of what you can do with Overgram
Overgram is a free version of Over (see above) from the same developers. Giving you access to 10 fonts and text alignment, it doesn't have as many fonts to choose from as the original paid-for version but there's still plenty of fun to be had. It offers a great user experience too.

08. Fontli

Use Fontli to discover inspirational photography of type throughout the world
Fontli is a social network of type lovers, enabling the community to collect and share inspiring examples of typography from everyday life. Using integration with MyFonts database, it also features type tagging on pictures. There's a Windows version too.

09. Swipe

Swipe allows you to add typography to your images with a quick (you guessed it) swipe. You can choose from over 100 fonts, then adjust text settings such as size, colour, transparency, rotation and alignment. There's plenty of sharing functionality and all edits are saved, allowing you to re-edit your photos as many times as you want.

10. Kern

Kern is a nifty little game that teaches kerning. A random word with a missing letter appears at a variable point size. As the leading begins to shrink, you navigate the missing letter to the proper space and release its handle to lock it in place. Your score is calculated based on the size of the type, the leading height, and the perfection of placement. It's a lot of fun and a great way to brush up on your skills.

11. Kern Type

Okay we're cheating a bit here, because this is stricly speaking a website and not an app. But if you'd like a free alternative to Kern (see above), Kern Type works beautifully on the iPad and looks fab on the Retina display. Again, you drag letters into place and the site tells you how well you've done.

12. The Typography Manual

There are plenty of typefaces and fonts resources, but the most valuable is the one you always have with you. The Typography Manual is a tiny iPhone app (just 12MB), which includes plenty of handy information about type, details on type anatomy, a glossary of type terminology, Mac and HTML key combos, an Em calculator, and a font-size ruler.

13. iFontMaker

Actually creating typefaces and fonts on an iPad might seem like an odd thing to do, but iFontMaker provides a straightforward interface for hand-drawn efforts that can subsequently be emailed or converted into a TTF file. In getting you away from standard tools and on to your iPad, there's also scope for 'thinking different', so to speak.

14. LetterMpress

Typefaces and fonts only entered the digital space relatively recently, but an iPad provides a link to the past with LetterMpress; this charming, somewhat addictive app enables you to work with and learn about vintage wood type and hand-driven printing presses, without making a mess. High-res output also ensures this is more than just a toy.

15. TypeDrawing

OK, so this one actually is a bit of a toy, but it's a very nice one. You type some text, pick a font and then finger-paint on the screen, adjusting type size, spacing, rotation and colour as you go. An image can be used as a foundation, also making this an app for rapidly adding text to photos.

16. Convertr

There are loads of conversion tools on the App Store, but Convertr has one of the cleanest and most straightforward interfaces we've seen. Also, along with typical distance conversion options (such as inches to centimetres), it has a bespoke typography section, for when you need to convert points to picas, or between various resolutions.

17. WhatTheFont

  • Works with: iPhone
  • Developer: MyFonts
  • Price: Free
  • Download
Everyone who works with typefaces and fonts at some point sees a piece of lettering and wonders what font is being used. WhatTheFont enables you to take a photo and - with a little luck - identify the font you’re looking at. Does it always work? No. But when it does, it's a little slice of fried tech gold.

18. Paper by FiftyThree

"Ideas begin on paper", is the slogan for this app, and that certainly used to be the case, but the move to digital's scuppered that. Paper's the closest thing on iOS to actual paper, offering a tactile experience via a bunch of bolt-on modules for sketching and colouring, which are useful for getting down font-design notes and ideas, especially if you’ve an iOS-compatible stylus handy.

19. Typefaces

Although web fonts have come on a long way, it's still useful to know the typefaces and fonts installed on a device. For whatever reason, Apple doesn’t provide a native viewing tool, but Typefaces ably comes to the rescue, listing iOS device fonts and also displaying available characters.

20. FontBook

On its release, FontBook was already a fantastic resource for researching and comparing typefaces and fonts, documenting the work of over a hundred type foundries. And then they went and updated it for the new iPad's Retina display, resulting in the closest thing to font porn you'll get on your device.

21. Byword

Although typographers have to deal with how typefaces and fonts look, they must often edit and write, too. On the iPad, plenty of heavily focused text-editing apps exist, but Byword gets our vote, primarily because it offers a live on-screen word-and-character count - handy for when you need to smash copy into a set space.

22. Typography Insight for iPad

A must-buy for anyone learning about or studying fonts, Typography Insight was created by Dong Yoon Park, an MFA design and technology student at Parsons The New School for Design. Essentially his thesis in interactive app form, it harnesses the iPad to help teach the subtleties of typography to help you to distinguish between fonts. The app lets you inspect the details of different typefaces, plus there are sections that teach how to measure typefaces and how to set type.

23. Fontula

Despite some rather strange app design choices (no preview; no strip of already created characters; an ‘old paper’ background), Fontula's a pleasing app for experimenting with creating new letterforms. Beyond merely experimenting by dragging shapes about, you can also export your work to TTF.

24. The Font Game

Perhaps the perfect game for font geeks, The Font Game pits you against 30 font samples and the clock. And once you've mastered the typefaces and fonts, it's time to tackle terminology. Don't know your open counter from your double dagger? Battling your chums in Game Center will sort that out soon enough.

25. FontBrowser

This app appears to have been repeatedly beaten with an ugly stick, but it's a useful freebie for browsing Unicode fonts and keystrokes. Symbols can be searched by type, saving precious minutes if you're frantically looking for a particular arrow symbol.

26. Quark DesignPad

Quark’s iPad app isn't a typography tool per se - it's instead a product for enabling you to rapidly wireframe grid-based designs. But given that many people who deal with typefaces and fonts on a daily basis also need to rapidly work up page layouts, we'd say DesignPad could become an indispensable part of your toolkit.

27. Palettes Pro

Designers of all kinds need to have a tool for creating colour palettes, and that's true for typographers, not least to check contrasts between type and backgrounds. Palettes Pro is a great standalone tool for your device, and it can export palettes when you need to work with them in Photoshop or Illustrator.

28. Pastebot

Although many apps enable you to export content via email or to Dropbox, there are times when you want a quicker means of getting stuff to and from your Mac. Pastebot via the free Pastebot Sync app provides the means to temporarily share a clipboard, and it works brilliantly. (And although there's no iPad app, the iPhone one works fine on Apple's tablet when in portrait.)

29. Fontly

Fontly is a bit like Instapaper for type geeks, enabling you to "capture, map, and explore the world of vintage typography". You take a snap of some lettering, then title and tag it, whereupon it's geo-tagged and added to the website - useful if you just have to visit that slightly faded sign in London.

30. Helvetica vs Arial

  • Works with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
  • Developer: Stephan Widor
  • Price: Free
  • Download
We could hardly have gone through an entire typography article without once mentioning the ongoing 'Helvetica versus Arial' battle. This game is as simple as they come: look at the text, press the right button, and hope that you don't make the wrong choice, or you'll be forever ostracised by the typography community. (Harsh but fair.)

Sumber: CreativeBloq
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