Today marks my first extended opportunity to flip through the new FontBook. By content, FontBook for iPad is a three-volume encyclopedia with an alphabetical and a chronological index. Browsing by classes made it easy to dig through a lot of similar options at once. I had the most fun browsing by designer; something like skipping through an artist’s discography.
I found that if you mark a font family with a star, you can run an alongside comparison with other ‘favorited’ families using the compare feature. It’s here also that you can see the type reversed over black, red, or in a number of high and low contrast color schemes.
Clearly it’s not a physical book — and when designing for print, verifying the physical proof makes all the difference. But insofar as it’s used primarily as a discovery tool (same as what the old FontBook was used for), the new FontBook is handy for people working in print, and perfect for those mainly concerned with performance on screen. Poring over it for an hour or two this morning I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.
