Way back in the day, during another life, in the days when Apple was a fledgling company that produced the LaserWriter printer, I dreamed of designing fonts for the masses. The tool of choice back then was Fontographer which Mac designers used to turn bit-mapped fonts into beautiful works of artistic fonts.
As it turned out, Fontographer was a great tool for those with patience and artistic ability and a more youthful me had less of both. Then along came TypeStyler, the Mac app which took any font and manipulated words, stylized letters, and constructed text logos with little more than point and click. It was, for those in the last century and users of Mac Classic OS, the de facto way to turn text into art.
TypeStyler came upon hard times during the early days of OS X and seemingly vanished from planet earth. A few years ago it returned, better than ever, and more affordable. What you see is what you get. Letters and words turn into art with just a few clicks.
As if not wanting to ruin a good thing by improving the look and feel, TypeStyler today looks and works much like the original from back in the day. Toolbar across the top highlights basic functions, while floating palettes of tools and preferences for each can be moved around on the Mac’s screen.
TypeStyler takes pretty much whatever font or graphic shape you throw at it, and turns it into art; grunge effects, gradient fills, strokes, color combinations of each element, even 3D-like graphics. TypeStyler doesn’t care much about what size you want your creation to be. Choose stamp size or poster size. Also built-in are commercial quality packaging prototypes, a 3D visualizer (think spheres, cones, disks, planes, cylinders, et al), and the whole shebang works well and plays nice-nice with Photoshop, Illustrator, Apple’s Keynote, and other Mac graphic design tools.
The package of font and shape tools makes TypeStyler an easy way to create posters, logos, advertisements, video titles, brochures or tracts, catalogs, newsletters and anything else that need a stylistically designed combo of text and shapes.
While TypeStyler was hibernating many Mac designers flocked to Art Text which remains a popular choice for font and text manipulation; which works much the same way but costs half as much.