Typeface 3 4+

Font Display, Organization And Use Are A Breeze!

I couldn’t be more pleased with this font management app! As a Graphic Designer, one of the projects I work on regularlly is for apparel designs/ecommerce DTG or screen printed products. Every design has to be completely different from the next to ensure originality. Typeface enables me to load an enormous collection of fonts with ease, categorize them in a way that works best for me and then to see them in a snap. I love that I can see exactly how each typeset word or sentence will look before choosing the best font.

I also cannot say enough about the customer service. When I’m really stuck and cannot figure out how to do something, I simply send an email with my questions or concerns and receive an informed response shortly afterward.

The value you receive with this app is unbeatable in my opinion. I asked several other graphic design colleagues who recommended this product to me. It’s no wonder they chose Typeface, it’s a fantastic app!

Okay, But Has Shortfalls

If you have a large font archive (thousands of fonts) this app effortlessly displays them quickly, even from a network location. The use of tags is a great way of grouping fonts with similar characteristics. Unfortunately tag combinations are strictly OR’d instead of optionally AND’d, limiting the potential power of tag filtering. Auto-activation of fonts is supported which is a nice feature at this price point. The interface has a few quirks to get accustomed to, but for now I cannot give more than 3 stars due to several fonts not previewing in list view despite glyphs being assigned to characters and other apps such as Font Book and Finder do show previews for them. Even system fonts such as Apple Braille, Apple Color Emoji, and Zapf Dingbats do not preview in Typeface but they do in Font Book and Finder. Thus, the effectiveness of searching for a font is reduced because you cannot see all the fonts while browsing. (You can see the font when previewing the characters, but not in the list view so it takes more time.) “Undo” functionality is limited, however the developer is great at replying to inquiries/critique and listens to suggestions for improvement. Adding support for dynamic waterfall text like Font Book and a "Find Similar Fonts" function like Suitcase Fusion would easily put this app at 5+ stars for me.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the feedback! You can combine the sidebar tags (OR) with the search filter (AND) to create complex queries (enter # in the search bar to get auto-completion). Typeface renders your entered preview text, so if a font does not support the characters you enter then those characters cannot be rendered either. I'll investigate ways to make this more useful for fonts like Apple Braille and Apple Color Emoji, such that they'll preview random characters those fonts support.

I wanted to like it

I am a home user and have a hard time justifying a $100 font manager. That said, I have around 1300 fonts installed and was hoping for an easy way to activate and deactivate by collection. Font Book for me runs extremely slowly, even though I have no problem in programs like Photoshop CC and Lightroom. Typeface will only run as fast as Font Book. I spent a lot of time making collections in Font Book and while Typeface will read them, they must be activated for Typeface to show them in their collection. If you have deactivated the fonts to speed up your system, then you can only reactivate them by going back into Font Book itself, or remember what fonts are in each collection and individually reactivate them. I deactivated a collection in Typeface, and when I went to Font Book, all the fonts had been moved out of the collection entirely, so now I have to rebuild it.

The filters are not that great, either, unfortunately. The Script option pulls up nothing that is actually a script, but fonts like vintage typewriter fonts and Marker Felt.

I was really hoping for more. Perhaps if I had less fonts and wanted to keep them all activated all the time it would be better for me, but I think I just need a more robust program.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the feedback! Make sure to update to version 2 which improved a lot on font (de)activation. All your fonts stay visible in the app and no need to switch to Font Book :)