The Font Game: an iPhone app for your inner typographer
Whomever first said the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” never took font into account. There are literally thousands of fonts in existence, spreading over a multitude of typefaces and alphabets—it’s no debate that typography should be considered an art form in it’s own right, and many graphics designers and typographers would agree. The folks at I Love Typography seem to think so; they’ve created an iPhone game that’s aimed to sharpen our font know-how.
And it even includes Comic Sans! Don't let this stop you from purchasing this app.
The Font Game [$0.99] is a straightforward game of multiple choice where the player is given font samples and is quizzed on their ability to correctly identify them. A total of 30 questions are asked, your score is tallied and your results are given to you at the end. Simple enough, right? Well despite the simplistic gameplay, The Font Game’s library of 657 font samples is sure to challenge even the most seasoned of graphic designers. In fact, the three levels of difficulty are aptly named: Somewhat Difficult, Rather Difficult, and Exceedingly Difficult.
Once finished you can optionally tweet your score or send it to the scoreboard—The Font Game is timed so that the Hall of Fame is headed with the highest scores in the quickest times. If you’re really good there’s even a WordPress plugin to display your score on your blog.
The best part about TFG is that it shows you the correct answers at the end in a convenient list; I’ve found this to be especially useful for learning about fonts that I would have otherwise never heard of. And English typefaces aren’t all there is: I’ve stumbled across Symbol (Wingdings!) and Japanese typefaces as well. This elegantly designed game also sports a landscape mode, though you can’t make your answer selections in it, unfortunately. Hopefully this will be added later in an update.
For $0.99 this game definitely lives up to its price and I would recommend it to any self-respecting graphic designer out there. You can see a few screenshots from the app in the gallery below.
