FontShop Blog

Crafting a well-branded message takes great design, and great design takes great typography.

When webfonts began to receive broad support at the tail end of the past decade, a new internet appeared with it. Given the ability to specify font families on the web, designers embraced their new medium and began to work layouts from the typography out, rather than from the bounds of an arbitrary rectangle inward.

From the first release of Web FontFonts, FontShop has delivered a consistent experience with type optimized for screen readability with faces that also get great results in print. That same level of sophistication is now available for mobile apps.

Customers choose what feels right.

Giving consumers a familiar experience, one that they’ll return to, is best accomplished by making use of familiar elements, like a continuous visual vocabulary, palette, voice, and tone. Consistent typography is one of the best ways to unobtrusively remind the customer that it’s you with whom they choose to deal. When deploying across multiple media, choosing similar faces can be a challenge, but when one starts with mobile fonts, it need not be.

Print, type’s first love.

Working in print, the level of typographic control and comfort inherent in a fixed media size is one of most fulfilling aspects of the process. Handling print media is a physical, literal experience. It seems that nothing has yet rivaled print’s ability to at once disarm and stimulate original thought. All of the faces offered in both mobile & web formats originated as print designs, and offer the level of sophistication that typographers have learned to expect from great print faces.

Mobile FontFonts let you use the same face across platforms

With mobile fonts, we’ve given designers the ability to work across media and create a consistent experience whether online, in print, or in-app. Visit MobileFontFonts.com to see a selection of mobile font packages in faces that can also be licensed for web and print as well.

Wondering how to talk to your app developer about mobile fonts?

Sending them the Mobile FontFont use page is a good start. From there they can download sample code, get a few pointers from our app developers (the same ones who designed the FontBook app), and even test a full-featured mobile font.

The example faces used in this post are FF Duper and FF Clifford. FF Duper Mobile, FF Duper Web, FF Duper Pro; FF Clifford Mobile, FF Clifford Web, FF Clifford Pro

October left us with a number of great new additions, including the new foundry psType and a new product line for a new destination, mobile fonts. See all of October’s new fonts.

FF Good, FF Celeste, FF Yoga & FF Suhmo Mobile Font packages

Mobile Fonts arrive. In the same way webfonts allow the designer to specify types outside of the web-safe options for the browser, mobile fonts give the app developer more choices that work at the application level on iPhone and iPad. Browse the Mobile FontFont microsite for a complete listing of fonts ready to embed in iOS apps.

Sweet Square by Mark van Bronkhorst, published by Sweet

Prior to type designer Mark van Bronkhorst’s expansion on the style into Sweet Square, the popular stationer’s face existed as type in the lone Sackers Square Gothic. Sweet Square completes the character set to include lowercase, and pairs the roman with an italic, in nine weights.

King Tut by Kevin King, published by Canada Type

King Tut is a wide slab serif family drawn from the 1850 Miller & Richard face Egyptian Expanded. The set extends from the monolinear thin weight to a rich heavy black weight, seven all together. The name, King Tut, makes a subtle reference to its author.

We’ve passed some bits around the office; shuffled some emails. Here are our staff picks for October.

David picks Leitura Sans by Dino dos Santos of DSType.

“Here’s a grotesque that plays on the edge between the American gothic and the European grotesque conventions. To me it comes off as refined and beautiful, set both large and small.” The Leitura Super Family claims Leitura Sans.

Meghan picks FF Good Mobile by Łukasz Dziedzic; published by FontFont

“As a self-proclaimed ‘app addict,’ I love that we now have mobile fonts. It will be nice once apps start looking different from one another using typefaces to brand. Glad that the future is here!”

Anna picks Katarine by Tomas Brousil from Suitcase.

“There’s just something about this face that makes it a pleasure to look at. I enjoy its softness as well as its variety of angles (check out the ‘w’!).”