The Bee’s Knees: Fontify

Hello, and welcome to the Bee’s Knees, the weekly special here at Comic Booked where I take a look at some of the different ways people combine words and pictures. This week we’re going small scale, down to the letter—down to the punctuation, even.

When I was very young and first learning my letters and numbers, I would on occasion amuse myself by turning them into pictures. I’d add arms and legs to the number 8 and a smiley face in the top loop, and then tell everyone at my lovely “eight person.”

Of course, as I grew up, I promptly forgot these random bits of art, but recently I found out about something that you could say brought my interest back. Fontify is a new app for Apple products that brings word art to a whole new level—and is lots of fun to play with as well.

What is Fontify, and how does it work? Basically, it’s an app where you can make pictures using letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. First, you choose a font—one from a long list, and you can mix and match all you want. Then you pick your letter/number/punctuation mark. Move it around, resize it, and angle it until it’s perfect, and then pick another letter. The surprising thing that I found was that it’s incredibly user friendly, and even if you’re not an artist or sure what to draw, the letters themselves can give brilliant ideas. The fonts give every picture a very stylized look, though artists also tend to develop individual flairs as well.

As if that weren’t enough fun in itself, Fontify is also a social art app—you can share your work with other users in the gallery. And not only that, but you can take someone else’s picture and edit it all you want, bringing it to the next level. Sound fun? You bet! Of course, if you don’t have an iPad/iPhone/iPod, there’s always the old fashioned idea of actually drawing the letters yourself. That particular approach is perhaps more artist-friendly, and the letters can still provide endless ideas for new works of art.

And that’s the bee’s knees for this week! Please join me next Friday for another way people blend words and pictures to create all-new forms of art. In the meantime, feel free to tell me in the comments section if there’s something you know of I should write about. Have you ever made a picture out of letters? How did it turn out? Please share!