Boost your skills and knowledge, create typefaces and play font-related games with these brilliant free font apps.

From iOS or Android, Windows to web apps, the app world is brimming with ways to improve your typography skills and make working with fonts quicker and easier. So typographers, this one’s for you – our pick of some of the best free typography apps that can make your font-oriented life a little easier and in some cases a lot more fun.

01. PicLab

free typography apps
Use the photo editor to quickly create trendy typographic images with this app

PicLab makes it easy to add typography to your photos, offering lots of fonts and full control over size, positioning, opacity, rotation, and colour. You can also do other things like layer illustrations, ornamentation and other design elements on top of your image.

02. Fontroid

free typography apps
A typography app for those that love to network
  • Platform: 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.

03. Fonts

free typography apps
Fonts is a useful iPhone typography app
  • Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)

Despite its incredibly unimaginitive name, free app Fonts helpfully displays all of the iPhone’s system fonts. The initial list is the font families, then each font (normal, bold, oblique) within the family and finally, details about each.

04. Tiff

free typography apps
Tiff is a typography app that allows you to compare fonts
  • Platform: Web

This nifty little web app enables you to compare how letters look in different typefaces. Tiff is described as “a typeface diff tool that visually contrasts the differences between two fonts”. When you first open the page, the letters R, g, h and e are being displayed in Helvetica (‘Font A’). To change the font, click the blue ‘Hide’ button (which changes to ‘Display’) and start typing in the field. A drop-down menu of fonts will appear. Make a selection and the letters below will change accordingly.
To compare with another font, do the same in the ‘Font B’ field and the two fonts will appear next to each other. You can also change the selection of letters at the bottom of the page. And you can see the fonts close up by clicking on the square. At this point, Google Web Fonts is the only source of external fonts for Tiff, but Yu is working on including more font sources.

05. Fontest

best free typography apps
Fontest developer tool allows you to check fonts on Android
  • Platform: Android

Fontest is a developer and typography tool that helps you quickly preview how your favorite fonts are rendered on Android. Includes six high quality free fonts.

06. WhatTheFont

best free typography apps
Discover fonts or very close approximations with this typography app
  • Platform: iOS (iPhone), Web app

Everyone who works with typefaces and fonts at some point sees a piece of lettering and wonders what font is being used. WhatTheFont enables you to take a photo and – with a little luck – identify the font you’re looking at. Does it always work? No. But when it does, it’s a little slice of fried tech gold.

07. Paper by FiftyThree

best free typography apps
Paper is a useful tool for type designers
  • Platform: iOS (iPad)

“Ideas begin on paper”, is the slogan for this app, and that certainly used to be the case, but the move to digital’s scuppered that. Paper’s the closest thing on iOS to actual paper, offering a tactile experience via a bunch of bolt-on modules for sketching and colouring, which are useful for getting down font-design notes and ideas, especially if you’ve an iOS-compatible stylus handy.

08. Typefaces

best free typography apps
Typefaces is another tool for discovering Apple’s fonts
  • Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)

Although web fonts have come on a long way, it’s still useful to know the typefaces and fonts installed on a device. For whatever reason, Apple doesn’t provide a native viewing tool. But free app Typefaces, developed by kanotomo, ably comes to the rescue, listing iOS device fonts and also displaying available characters.

09. FontBrowser

best free typography apps
A curiously old-school typography app, but FontBrowser still appeals
  • Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)

This app appears to have been repeatedly beaten with an ugly stick, but it’s a useful freebie for browsing Unicode fonts and keystrokes. Symbols can be searched by type, saving precious minutes if you’re frantically looking for a particular arrow symbol.

10. Quark DesignPad

best free typography apps
Not a typography app, but a useful tool for typographers
  • Platform: iOS (iPhone and iPad)

Quark’s free iPad app isn’t a typography tool per se – it’s instead a product for enabling you to rapidly wireframe grid-based designs. But given that many people who deal with typefaces and fonts on a daily basis also need to rapidly work up page layouts, we’d say DesignPad could become an indispensable part of your toolkit.

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