Fontli is a social network for Typography enthusiasts to broadcast their passion through pictures taken from a mobile device. What makes Fontli different from other photo sharing applications is its typography centric features. Users can spot a typeface by simple photo tagging and Fontli gives additional information on the Typeface such as Designer/Foundry info and other pictures tagged with it.
If you have an iPhone you probably use and love Instagram. But if you also love type and typography, you need to check out fontli. It provides basically the same functionality as Instagram and is supposed to be used the same way—just that it only focuses on type and typography.
Just like on Instagram you have a picture feed of people you follow, a page for popular images, and a news section where you can see updates about your account or the accounts of the people you follow. And of course you can share your images directly via Twitter and Facebook.
But since it is a type-related app, there is also some functionality, that is not on Instagram: fontli is connected to the MyFonts database and you can easily mark the fonts you have just photographed and other people can add these fonts as a favorite, create sample texts with these typefaces and so on. A very nice and handy feature! In the future you will even be able to follow your favorite fonts and automatically see pictures where these fonts have been used. Nice!
The app is created by the Indian company Pramati Technologies Private Limited. Currently its an iPhone-only app, but more devices (including Windows and Android platforms) will be added soon.
At the time of this writing, the content feels still a little bit poor and random. When you start the app for the first time, your stream will only show some rather random type pictures of the official fontli account and the function for adding your Facebook friends to the streams is not yet available. But as soon as this app reaches a critical mass and some interesting type geeks will start to use it, this app has certainly the potential to become a big success in the typographic community. So check it out: http://www.fontli.com
The app itself is free, but I am very certain that the developers will be making money thru the MyFonts integration–but that seems like a fair deal for me.
Imperdibile per gli appassionati di caratteri tipografici questa “Fontli“: app gratuita per iPhone e iPad che ci permette di scoprire i font che spesso vediamo in giro, ma non abbiamo modo di condividere o non riusciamo a riconoscere all’istante. L’idea è quella di un Instagram per la tipografia: un social network su dispositivi mobile dove i nostri scatti vengono accolti, commentati e combinati.
Possiamo chiedere informazioni o darne, mostrare come certi font sono stati utilizzati, collezionarli: tutto in tempo reale e con un’interfaccia rapida e gradevole. “Fontli” si scarica a questo indirizzo sull’AppStore. Qui invece trovate il Tumblr degli sviluppatori.
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