Most text-over-photo apps turn pictures into things that look like badly edited Photoshop nightmares, thanks to crowded interfaces, mediocre typography, and too many customization choices. Fortunately, hope for clean, attractive text overlays is renewed with the app Photolettering, released yesterday by the type foundry House Industries.

The application proves that stripping away unnecessary features and focusing on a select number of quality options, in this case typography, makes the mobile creative process easier.

What sets Photolettering apart from existing image-text applications is the expertise of its creators – typography. Since 1993, House Industries has been creating some of the boldest typefaces in many different styles, but all with their own distinct personality. The app comes with three free typefaces: Plinc Swiss, Bubble Gum, and House Slant, and 20 additional typefaces can be purchased in-app for 99 cents each, or $9.99 for the entire collection. Considering the purpose of the app is text over image, typefaces coming from a type foundry make a huge difference. Rich Roat, one of the founders of House Industries, says he hopes that bringing more attention to the typography with House Industries' professionally designed fonts will set Photolettering apart from competitors.

"It seems like there is a new type-over-photo app every day, but we always thought that the quality and selection of fonts was lacking," Roat says. "We've been making fonts for over 20 years, and now we have this great medium that allows us to introduce them to people who might not have cared about good display typography before."

Photolettering stands out with its interface as well – or its lack of one, at least in the conventional sense. Open up the app and you're brought to your camera view with dummy text ready for you to manipulate, making it easy to snap a picture, type a short message, customize it, and save it. Photolettering is designed so it doesn't need much of a structured interface – two black bars at the top and bottom of the screen and a pull-out tab hold all the tools you need. You can choose to take a new photo, use a photo from your library, or use just a colored background. Maneuvering and changing text is super easy as well because you can move, scale, and rotate it using finger gestures, rather than controllers on a sidebar like other apps.

Photolettering's simple interface and clean font choices help it stand out from other text-overlay apps. Photo: Courtesy Rich Roat.

Photolettering is a nod to old-school display typography in a literal and nostalgic way. The app shares its name with the famous film-lettering company Photo-Lettering, which House Industries bought ten years ago. The company was one of the earliest type houses to use photo technology to produce commercial typography and lettering (a process which is also named "photo-lettering"), and it was the leading display type house in New York from 1936 to 1997. The type designers at Photo-Lettering's Murray Hill office hand-drew all of the company's typefaces, sometimes taking over 200 hours to complete one alphabet. Those alphabets and the process of photo-lettering were then sought out by publishers to give print materials a crisp finish, thanks to the first-generation exposure each character achieved with the machinery of the time.

Unfortunately the days of e-mail, scanners, and digital publishing have made the term "photo-lettering" obsolete, but House Industries made sure that piece of design history wasn't lost forever by saving Photo-Lettering's collections and starting to digitize them.

The meticulous, labor-intensive process of photo-lettering might be gone now, but that doesn't mean we have to sacrifice beautiful, unique typography. And it also doesn't mean we shouldn't be used to seeing beautiful typography outside the print world – typography is just as important in digital spheres, if not more important. With an app like Photolettering, maybe more you'll start to take note of the typographic choices you make, even if it's just to put the phrase "I can has cheezburger" over a photo of your cat.