App Insiders

A nicely made distraction, but is it really worth it?

The creation of first time App Store developers ‘Hansol Huh’, Type Drawing originally began life as an online project that allowed users to create images using words as their only tool. This conversion provides more or less the same service, only this time it’s obviously on a portable device.

My very own 'Dead Kitty'. Impressed?

Basically, users first decide with what words they want to create their image and the font (there are 5, as well as options to embolden text in certain fonts) with which they want them to appear. After either choosing to use one of the two default backgrounds available, or an image from your photo album, it’s then as simple as touch-drawing your picture. The speed with which you draw each section of each line determines how large the text in that section will appear. The faster you go, the larger the font and vice versa.

This is all done very well, and there appears to be some system of auto-correction being used so that your lines don’t appear too jagged in the final image. It’s accessible enough so that within a half an hour I was competently creating text-art with the best of them. However, no matter how competent I may have become, mistakes are, of course, something of an inevitability, so it was comforting to find that they included a quick and easy ‘undo’ key into the interface.

From there you can save your images to your iDevice and are encouraged to share and upload them (through your computer) to a website. It’s certainly disappointing that this wasn’t built directly into the application, as it surely wouldn’t have been overly complicated to do and would have extended the product’s longevity significantly.

Type Drawing also allows you to choose to alter photos and other images with text.

The Last Word

Type Drawing is an application that achieves most of what it sets out to accomplish. With a clean and user-friendly interface, the creation of text-images is made a relatively simple process for newcomers, while also providing advanced users with the opportunity to shine. However, it is noticeably lacking in certain features. For instance, there’s no way for users to upload and share art directly from their iDevices, and an ‘eraser’ isn’t included, so you can’t make quick adjustments to your works without the use of the undo key, which can sometimes be inconvenient.

It is, for the most part, a well made application, but after the three or four images I created during its review, I really can’t imagine myself going back for more anytime soon. Its simple text drawing mechanism, while neat, feels like it should have been included in a larger, more comprehensive, image editing program. But for the single dollar price tag the developers have chosen, many may find Type Drawing to be a worthwhile investment.

For those of you interested in the web-based version of type drawing, click here.