Time Wasters: Type Games

While there are a multitude of sites and games out there on the Internet these days, I find the best way to waste time is to multitask playing games and learning something. Being a type nerd, what better way to do this than through and educational and - at least to me - entertaining type games!

The first game is Kern Type. I find this game to be a very useful tool to exercise recognizing proper spacing between letters. Once you play it a couple of times, you begin to get pretty competitive with yourself. I find the nice thing about this game is that it grades you on how well you have done and shows you the proper kerning. Additionally, the keyboard commands used to play this game are very similar to the ones used in the Adobe suite.

This game is available on the Internet as well as the iPad.

The Font Game brought to you by ilovetypography is less of a game and more of a flash card app. Available on you iPhone and iPad for $1.99 as well as, apparently on the internet here, this game teaches you to identify fonts by their names. Much like learning the names of capitols or elements in the periodic table, I find the best way to learn is to see the font, guess what it is, and then check my answers. This game is exactly that. With 3 different levels of difficulty (level 1 is difficult enough!), I think that every type nerd should probably own this game.

In addition to font names, it also has a terminology game. This helps you match the names to the proper symbols and punctuation. This one includes a significant amount of foreign language symbols, making it rather difficult, but still worth the time.

Shape Type is made by the same people as Kern Type and uses the familiar motions of manipulating type in illustrator to create a game made especially for us type nerds. While I am new to this one, the couple of times I have played it have made me realize that

a) there are some extremely dedicated type nerds out there, and

b) html 5 is pretty awesome.

As I am new to this one, I don't have much to add about it. I guess you'll just have to find out yourself!