Bringing Color Fonts to Messaging
Fontmoji Mobile App
Color fonts—where font letters can have multiple colors, shapes and texture—are still fairly new. Even though they’ve been around since 2016 many typographers have yet to really experiment with color fonts or even hear about them at all. That said, their use is growing and now being adapted for use in mobile messaging for the first time. The first mobile app to adopt color fonts for messaging is Fontmoji.
Fontmoji uses color fonts to allow people send expressive messages or “fontmojis.” Their iOS keyboard converts messages from iMessage’s default San Francisco font to over 80 available fonts. These color fonts have letters shaped out of birthday cake, balloons, fire, water, chocolate, and pencils, to name a few. Some of these fonts use the older Truetype font format, but most of their available fonts are color fonts, using the Opentype SVG format.
Interestingly, they’ve recognized that color fonts allow fans to engage with their favorite brands. Previous font formats didn’t allow brand logos with complex texture or multiple colors to be rendered into a font—any complex texture or multiple colors would be lost. Now smash hit TV shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things to video games like PUBG & Fortnite can be rendered as completely identical fonts.
It will be interesting to see how color font technology further evolves our modern day communication.
