Christopher Lewis @bychrislewis - Tumblr Blog

Need Done App

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Currency App

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HeyHey The Voice App

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Home Depot

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Monotype iPad App from donnacha carroll on Vimeo.

This is a great interpretation of what type specimens could become, and instead of just looking through you could have a lot more control over the various styles, and be able to compare and move them around. This video is a good example of how we could show our design, although some of the timing when he presses is slightly delayed but a small delayed could be expected.

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Filtry from Filtry on Vimeo.

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Beyblades

Beyblade, known in Japan as Explosive Shoot Beyblade is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Takao Aoki to promote sales of spinning tops called "Beyblades."

These much like lego and geomag are a kit of parts in which you put together and can take apart switching different bits in and out. When I was younger I spent a fair bit of time swapping bits in and out especially the weight part of the beyblade as that and the base were the parts in which effected the performance the most. The creativity comes into beyblades with the fact you can change all the pieces customising your full spinning top, then you have different chips with imagery in which you can switch into the top. This is a really nice add due to the fact they have a series in which to promote the beyblades in which when they release them the imagery on the top of the blades start to battle. This enables kids to almost use there imagination during there own games with these toys, although it will not be nearly as good as they make it look in the series it does add a sense of extra imagination.

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Activity and Colouring Books

Although mainly focusing around apps looking into a variety of type based apps which get the user involved in either creating type or educating them in type to enable them to use type more effectively or just generally a better knowledge. These books are a good simple example of either something people can use as a template to creative outcome or as a got to to get ideas to make something creative. Specifically the book here has chosen to focus on a rainy day giving you things you could do within your house if your bored.

Gave me the idea of a book of things you can make around your house with everyday objects like bottles, cans, plastic bags. I have seen a book for lads about how to make all sorts of things at home like slingshots and things which was partly where the idea came from but thought it would fit around the whole idea of reusing things as well which is something we like to promote nowadays.

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The Font Game

Perhaps the perfect game for font geeks, The Font Game, created by Justin Stahl, pits you against 30 font samples and the clock. And once you've mastered the typefaces and fonts, it's time to tackle terminology. Don't know your open counter from your double dagger? Battling your chums in Game Center will sort that out soon enough.

A good mixture of educational value and fun this game teaches the fundamentals of type as well as having the essentials of a game, although some may say not the funnest of games, its a good tool in which you could use in learning type without just looking through books or webpages. Plus the actual interaction with it and learning the answers in fact I think you would subconsciously be learning and remembering typefaces. The overall design of the game is basic and easy to navigate, they could add some more colour to make it more interesting and fun as it does tend to look like quite a serious game rather than actually fun.

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Fontula

Despite some rather strange app design choices (no preview; no strip of already created characters; an 'old paper' background), Fontula's a pleasing app for experimenting with creating new letterforms. Beyond merely experimenting by dragging shapes about, you can also export your work to TTF.

Another type based app, but instead of using existing types this enables you to create your own. It uses a nice simple grid and then it enables you to place blocks and other shapes in order to create your type. Some of the best features of the app include the fact you can actually make your creation into a useable typeface on most operating systems, as well as a feature in which it dynamically saves as you tap and change things so even if the app closes it saves your latest work. This is a great feature in my eyes as every designer has featured software closing and losing everything and know how frustrating it is. Therefore this app has some great features and is a good app to play around on the move creating interesting type. It is only iPad only though, they could update in order to be iPhone friendly as well.

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Path On

Path lets you add funky text to photos in unique ways. You draw the path you'd like the words to take, then type in your message - the text then flows along the path. The custom options are the real killer feature here, with you being able to adjust the font, the letter space, and the alignment. The photo filters are best avoided, though.

I found this interesting as I’ve started to notice a trend within these apps in which they have all taken an element of either a part of design or a process in which they have based these various apps about. This one happens to let you draw a path in which you can then lay type across easily in which is reasonably easy anyways within the adobe software but for amateurs they could struggle with a task like that. This almost just singles out the 2 tools in which you would use to do it and lets you do it straight off. But obviously the down point is that is purely all you can do on it is type following a path, granted they have a variety of types but not as many as you would on photoshop or illustrator. Overall from an app point of view it does a good job for what it’s set out to do therefore a successful app.

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A+ Signature

Make your mark on your photos with multi-usage photo annotation app A+ Signature. With an impressive selection of fonts to choose from, this app can do various things, ranging from creating nifty photocards to send to friends and family, to putting your signature on a photo.

This could be a useful tool if you like to upload imagery of your work and quickly want to add your signature to a photo of your work before uploading in order so no one else could take credit for your work. Also for any amateur photographers as such, and with Instagram being so popular now and people becoming almost Instagram famous this app could become useful for those Instagram photographers.

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Fontroid - Android

Looking for Japanese handwriting fonts? Fontroid is a social font service that allows people to create and share their handwriting fonts with others all over the world.

Another app I found while researching in which is mainly aimed at Japanese type but could easily be used for English as well. But specifically for Japanese type its works particularly well due to the fact there types are very hand reared in the look. Styled with brush strokes, this makes it easier for them to use the app to display there various letter forms. Using this for English type would work but I think I would find it hard using either a iPad or iPhone due to the fact drawing on them clean straight lines which occur often throughout the English alphabet would be difficult therefore would be hard to get across various types as detailing would also be difficult. The actual concept of the app is a really good tool, but you could say its very similar to any drawing app as it uses very much a similar layout, with a canvas and pen to draw with only its more basic.

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Font Candy

Mask your photos with words using custom captions, symbols and gorgeous fonts with iOS app Font Candy. Developed byEasy Tiger Apps, this cool tool allows users to transform their images by adding shapes and gradients, layering images and applying different blend modes.

Another type based app I found called Font Candy this is a more basic and creative app in which you can actually apply various types to existing images you may have on your phone. It’s almost just a quick way of captioning an image. But its more complex in the way you can play with various blending options.

The main factor of the app I did like is it actually has a quite in-depth set of tools to edit the type, you can edit the size, character space, line spacing. This is a good way to get basic knowledge on type layout. Although you may not know your learning better awareness of layout I think by playing around on a app like this it could defiantly improve your awareness towards type.

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AnyFont

AnyFont lets you install any TrueTypeFont (.ttf), TrueTypeCollection (.ttc) or OpenTypeFont (.otf) for system-wide usage on an iPhone or iPad without the need of a Jailbreak. The installed fonts can then be used by any other app that accesses the iOS font book. This is currently the case for example with Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Office Suite Pro, Office²HD and many other apps.

After Tom in our group had an idea in which we create an app much like Shazam for music but for typefaces therefore you can take a picture of a typeface and it will tell you what the typeface is and then give you the chance to either download the type or take you to a page in which you can buy the typeface.

This lead to me to look at existing type based apps therefore finding this app, and although this don’t make for a creative outcome it is a very useful tool in which I’m many a people have found useful when they would like to use a variety of types on there iPhone or iPad.

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Cristina Oliver

The way in which she has interpreted the letters of her name using very squared off shaped type, and then playing the ‘C’ within the ‘O’ making for a very simplistic, yet understandable logo for her self branding. It works well both as a coloured logo and a flat black or white logo which is always a good thing from a logo, as you’ll never know whether you’ll be using it in colour all the time.

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N̈UF

N̈UF is a producer of high quality outerwear. Founded in 1987, it has always been at the forefront of its field, and continues on with that tradition still today. We set out to rebrand this industry leader with an identity worthy of the 21st century. Bold, modern, and simplistic keeping with the company's own aesthetics.

This project was a great project for me to see the design processes that he went through when designing this new branding. How he’s took the idea of the flow of the mountains and paths and considered that when creating the logo. Also the consideration of sizing, making sure it looks clean and clear at all sizes. Trying a variety of colours as well to see which colours work best, as well as trying it clear with imagery behind. This meant that he knows that this identity he has created will work well across any media of imagery that the brand may want to use it with or across. Overall the abstract logo type is an effective piece of branding which in my opinion works brilliantly for this brand.

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