When you find or discover a cool typeface family you want to take a more detailed look at, you can do so in a single investigation window. Every subcategory has a carefully designed UI, which is always optimized for the content it contains - typical content curation when it comes to type design: plain, simple, with only subtle changes to always keep the focus on the actual content and distinct between typography in action (for menu heading etc.) and the actual typefaces you look at in order to investigate them. You then can smoothly scroll through the various new choices until you find an interesting one (in this UI, I personally missed an alphabet scroll selector like in the Music app to easily reach a certain letter). Sometimes you get a fixed, black and yellow screen (like the calendar-styled year list) other times, the designer or foundry lists are displayed horizontally and sorted alphabetically. To keep the panels distinctive enough, some are underlined in yellow – which is also an intelligent use of FontShop’s corporate color scheme.ĭepending on which category or other feature you choose, the layout subtly changes in colors indicating the new categories. This is also true for all subcategories, so, for instance, the panel for accessing typefaces from Spiekermann within the designer category window is bigger than the one for Max Miedinger’s typefaces (designer of Helvetica).
from a subcategory back to the main window. The larger a category is divided up, the larger is the square to tap on the screen. In this category selection process, FontBook features a nicely embedded multi-touch gesture: by pinching in, you can move one layer upwards, e.g.
#Fontbook for ipad full#
The window’s layout is used all over the app: short abbreviations (like ”Cl” for class) underlined with the full category name - everything in bold sans-serif typefaces - fill up squares you tap to dive deeper into the world of fonts. Additionally, you can access the FontShop blog and look at various typefaces in use for inspiration and understanding what kind of typefaces should be used in which situation. The main screen of FontBook features an overview of the categories you can choose to browse typefaces: class, name, designer, year, and type foundry. FontBook is developed by a 10 person team at FontShop, one of the largest and the longstanding typeface resellers on the Internet, founded by renowned Erik Spiekermann in 1989, so it is no real surprise that it executes this need for exact design with pure perfection. I usually discuss an app’s design separately at the end of a post, but FontBook has to be an exception from that, since the app itself is showing perfect use of digital typography and content curation - in no other area of design, content and design are connected as closely as in typography.
Finally I can discover new typefaces, designers, and foundries wherever I go, offline, just with my iPad. Hence after I saw the introduction of FontBook by FontShop (which was recently updated to version 2.1 with a Retina-optimized UI), the app was an instant-buy for me. Since I watched Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica” documentary film, I constantly follow several type foundries and blogs (of which I consider I Love Typography and Typedia the top-notch sites) to keep myself updated on the latest news and typefaces.
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