The Typography Manual app for iPhone and iPad
4.6 (
116 ratings )
Reference
Book
Developer:
Justin Stahl
3.99 USD
Current version:
1.5.1, last update: 7 years ago
First release : 12 Jul 2009
App size: 12.08 Mb
"The more I use The Typography Manual, the more I fall in love with it and find fascinating bits of information I never knew I needed."
*5 Stars* - Macworld
The Typography Manual is a pocket resource for graphic designers and anyone that works with type. It provides all the essentials of a book reference on your iPhone or iPod Touch!
The Type Manual features a 60+ page book covering the history of type, type basics, how to properly set text and special characters, typography on the web, graphic design topics, and more.
The Visual Type Anatomy Glossary is a 100+ glossary of type terminology that doesnt just give you a definition, it shows you on the letters themselves.
Use the Style Guide to correctly set numbers, punctuation, capitalization, titles, and references.
Not sure how to create that degree symbol or currency mark? Use the Mac Character Keyboards to quickly find the key combination you need. Putting that special character into HTML? Hop over to the HTML Character Codes to find the right HTML number.
The Em Calculator can speed up your development time in creating scalable type for the web by doing the division for you.
Reading a magazine and curious what the type size is? Use the Font Size Ruler to get an estimate in serif or sans-serif.
The Type Manual also has references for paper and web banner sizes, resources on the web, inspiration and blogs, and a listing of type foundries.
*TESTIMONIALS*
"The Typographic Manual is exactly the kind of thing that shows off the kind of application/content hybrid publishing model that the iPhone is such an excellent platform for. A thing of beauty." - Edd Dumbill
"Absolutely incredible app. Im really astonished at how great it is."
"The more I play with it, the more amazing this app is! You really thought of everything!"
"This is bar none the best app I’ve seen on type. A must have if you’re a designer."
Pros and cons of The Typography Manual app for iPhone and iPad
The Typography Manual app good for
Would love to see this nice and usefull helper on the iPad as well...
Im by no means a professional typographer, but Ive been really pleased with this combination application and reference book. Its a real pleasure to navigate (aside from the glossary, but the developer is working on a better version of that). A sleek clean App that offers exactly what it says it will while showing off the best of iPhone user interface. Well made.
Well organized, attractive and eminently useful.
@thecitylab
This a wonderful app for those passionate about typography, the resources it has are also quite useful.
This is an outstanding typography reference. For use in Japan, it would be useful even for a non-native speaker of English, in my opinion, because of the large amount of poor typography you see when out and about in Japan.
日本には英語のTypographyの悪い例が多い為、日本のデザイナーさんにも役に立つかと思います。分かりやすい説明が主ので、ある程度英語力が必要、ですね。
Comprehensive information, tools for graphic and web designers, nice interface. Please, add basic information on how to create your own fonts, enhance the section that deals with the most famous characters and possibly facilitate the page scrolling with arrows that do not require that the user always go back in menu.
Note: why not allow users to choose which font to view the manual? It would make it more immediate.
La aspettavo da tempo. Poche ma esaustive informazioni, strumenti utili per grafici e web designers, interfaccia piacevole. A voler proprio mettere i puntini sulle "i" aggiungerei informazioni di base su come creare propri fonts, arricchirei la sezione che tratta dei caratteri più noti e magari faciliterei lo scorrimento delle pagine con pratiche frecce che non obblighino lutilizzatore a tornare sempre indietro nel menu.
Some bad moments
For $4 I expected a lot more from this app. FontShop has a fantastic app that goes beyond Wikipedia reiteration. Save your money; you probably already know everything this app has.
Theres really not much useful information in this little application; nothing that could not have been easily incorporated in a 10- or 12-page booklet. The buyer would be better off instead spending a few extra bucks to buy the excellent "Elements of Typographic Style" book.
Its not very well written, and has unfortunate spelling lapses such as "An em dash is one em wide, hence its (sic) name..."
Being a creative director for x many years and so on. This app is beyond useless! its filled with typographical mistakes (widows, rivers....) and clearly not worth my typing another word.
This is a good start as a reference tool for graphic design students--but in some cases misses the mark on being comprehensive. Elementary topics such as proof readers marks, the ability to view type specimens in more than one point size (and in papragraph form), vertical alignmnt rules, and better examples to heirarchy rules are missing. The all too condensed "brief history" should be expanded. There are major milestones that were omitted from the this section. To leave them out, only shortchanges the general public from understanding how typography has evolved to present day.
Why would I want to read about typography on my iPhone? Ive got books for that. I was hoping for cheat sheets for dingbats and symbols, a calculator for converting pixels and picas, etc... the things you cant remember and need to look up. I found the app Convert for conversion instead.
I have enjoyed this application -- but now it requires iOS 4, rather than smoothly downgrading for older software. Plenty of folks I know are sticking with OS 3 on their older iPhones. Why make the decision to lock us out from continuing to enjoy The Typography Manual?
