A nifty little iPad app for creating fonts on the go.
Being an Apple geek and designer, when I heard that there was an app for creating your own fonts, I was straight onto the app store to make my newest purchase! Fontula is an iPad app that allows you to create and export your own typefaces, using a simple intuitive method.
Fontula boasts:
- Generate scalable True Type fonts (TTF).
- Fonts can be used on any system which supports TTF (basically most of the popular operating systems like Windows / Mac / Linux).
- Fonts are emailed to you.
- Dynamically saves every tap. So even if you close the app accidentally, you don't loose any of your hard work.
- Currently supports 102 Glyphs. More Glyphs will be added soon.
Creating the font couldn't have been easier, (as you can see from my first attempt above) along the right-hand side of the app all the fonts characters are displayed, allowing you to jump quickly between glyphs. Once a glyph is chosen you are presented with a grid style page that allows you to drop square blocks into place, slowly building up your font.
You also have the option of setting where the next character will start from, with a simple drag-able red marker line.
I loved creating my font, but I do have a few little niggles with the app. There is no way to view your font as you build it (It would be handy to see how your characters sit together as your working). Currently the only way to do this is to create your font, have it emailed to yourself, and install on your machine for testing. This can be a little bit long winded, and having a preview screen would have really helped me. The other little niggle is the number of blocks you can use. Currently everything is very square, and angular. It would be nice to have a few different, more complex blocks, for building more detailed fonts, but a great starting point.
Overall it was a great app, and we hope to see improvements and with more blocks and 'glyphs' soon.
