LetsMoveToTheMoon

God, Technology, and Things That Make Us Want to Move to the Moon

Idea #1: Font Scheme Generator

March 30, 2009

This is part 1 of 3 in a series on ideas to create or improve web and desktop applications. See also parts 2 and 3: “Idea #2: Two iTunes Features That Should Have Been There a While Ago” and “Idea #3: Google People Search – Convenient or Just Plain Creepy?“

In redesigning this blog, I’ve thought a lot about fonts. I know that it probably doesn’t show, since I’m still not very good with typography and what-not, but I certainly tried. It would be nice if I could find a website or application that would help me with this effort.

We’ve all seen various color scheme generators built for web and graphic designers. These applications take one or two colors that you provide and create a color scheme based on your given starting point. Others work similarly and build a color scheme based on the colors in an image that you upload. I’ve been thinking that someone should apply a similar technique for font generation.

This application would be simple: the user would select or insert one or two fonts and the application would return a scheme for a website or other document. Options could include the total number of output fonts, degrees of variation in fonts, preview sizes of output fonts, etc. I imagine that this would be no more difficult to design than a color scheme generator, and it would certainly be helpful to hopeless designers like me.

I looked around to make sure this didn’t already exist, and to my knowledge it doesn’t. That said, if any of you know of an application that does this, definitely let me know!