Production credits: Profile Books, Exact Editions
Launch date: 25 October 2010
We love a bit of typography here at The Literary Platform (our own site is designed by the typographer Sam Oakley), so it’s great to see that Profile Books has made Simon Garfield’s Just My Type: A Book About Fonts available as a book app.
Simon Garfield meets the people behind typefaces and along the way learns why some fonts are from Mars and some are from Venus. He explores type on the high street and album covers to the print in our homes and offices.
Just My Type tells the story of fonts, examining how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. It explains why we are still influenced by type choices made more than 500 years ago, and why the T in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters. It profiles the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, as well as people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook.
The app was developed by Exact Editions, the London-based digital publishing company. The Just My Type app has fully searchable text, in-app purchasing and pageflow for easy navigation.
Rebecca Gray at Profile Books explained that an app was “the ideal showcase for this very visual book, particularly because Apple first introduced us to choosing our own fonts in 1984.”
£7.99