Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Simple as Milk are a branding and web design team based in Eastbourne, UK, with a passion for helping start ups get off the ground through great design. If you ever visited Assistly, colorati.com or cloudwords.com, you’ll have seen their work. It’s good stuff.
They joined the beta in February and soon began trying Typecast out on their site’s redesign. We first discovered what they were up to when they tweeted a link to their early design and tagged a copy with #typecast in Dribbble.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
We recently spoke to their founder and designer, David Pomfret, to hear what he and the team thought of Typecast, how they fit it into their workflow, and what shaped their typographic choices. Here’s what he had to say:
What were your first impressions of Typecast?
When I first heard of Typecast I was very excited. We’ve always loved typography, especially as we originally started as a print design studio. Typecast allows me to approach my web typography just how I would when designing for print, and that’s a big deal.
What brief did you set yourselves?
Our old site was always known for its crazy typography, and I didn’t want to lose this effect, but I did want a more refined, traditional print style. I’ve always loved this brochure that one of our clients had years ago. (We didn’t design it, but whoever did is a god!) It inspired us to create our new typography-based site with Typecast.
Tell us about your font choices and pairings.
I’ve always loved Brandon Grotesque. It’s a beautiful workhorse font that oozes character. It complemented the design really well, producing a subtle indication of letterpress due to its personality and shape. We thought Abril Fatface worked perfectly for the vintage feel we wanted, and it’s a beautiful choice when you want headlines with impact.
Both choices were inspired by the brochure, which uses Gotham and Bodoni.
How useful did you find the app?
Typecast made the whole process incredibly smooth, allowing me to rapidly try out different fonts and sizing without having to write a single line of code. Because let’s face it, I wasn’t going to do it in Photoshop!
How has your workflow changed to incorporate Typecast?
Before, I would bear with Photoshop and work tirelessly to present my typography how I wanted it. Now I just do my typography in Typecast instead of Photoshop.
For content-heavy sites, I use Typecast to build out the typography first, before I do any design work, and then build it into a working wireframe online. For projects that are light on typography, I design in Photoshop first. Then when the design concept is approved by the client, I use Typecast for the final tweaks to typography and perfections.
For me, Typecast is a tool to perfect your typography on normal sites and to craft your typography from scratch on content-heavy sites. When you do so, it makes a huge difference.
What did you enjoy most about designing in Typecast?
The best part of Typecast, for me, is being able to hand my front-end developer the typography CSS and a style guide knowing that my typography will alway be perfect without me putting in any further effort. I get to do what I love about my job, design, rather than spending hours on style guides and inside Web Inspector.
Now that you’ve tried it out, do you think you’d use Typecast again?
I imagine we’ll be using Typecast on all client projects from now on. It brings that element of typography sex that no other design programme (other than InDesign) seems to be able to rival right now. The web needs to learn how to do typography right, because, after all, we are designing to display content.
It’s exciting to see designers like Simple as Milk using Typecast on real projects. That puts us one step closer to making the web a more beautiful place! We wish them all the best and a future of ass-kicking, Vitamin D goodness.
Using Typecast on a project too? Let us know! Email hello@typecastapp.com or post a pic and tag it #typecast so we can feature you in our Gallery too.