Getting Started

New to our Typecast® app, or haven't gotten started yet?

Video Tutorials

• 

  Get to know the interface

  Find out how to create, edit and save new projects.

• 

  Adding & Structuring Content

  Learn how to add HTML content into your projects, ready for styling.

Common starting questions

The slide deck mentions global properties. What do you mean?

In graphic design tools, you have to adjust each object individually to consistently apply a style change across your content. But in our app, styles are powered by CSS. This means they’re linked. So any change you make to a style’s setting will appear everywhere on your canvas that that style occurs. So if you have 20 chunks of text set as a <p> in black, and you reset the <p> to blue, all 20 chunks of text will turn blue at once.

This relationship between text and CSS styles can be a huge design advantage, allowing you to experiment faster, compare and make changes much more quickly than in other design tools.

Containers sound like divs. Are they?

They are. Right now new containers always share styles, but we’re working on some cool new features to let you add a class to a container so that you can make it unique.

You say I’ll have to pay the font providers when I’m ready to publish. Is that through the Typecast™ app or directly to them?

After you’ve experimented and decide which fonts you want to use in your design, you’re ready for export. If you’ve used fonts from Fonts.com® there’s nothing to pay, because your Typecast™ subscription includes a free Fonts.com® Standard plan. Likewise, if you used Google® Web Fonts, there’s nothing to pay, as their fonts are always free of charge. If your design includes fonts from Typekit®, Webtype® or Fontdeck®, you’ll need to have an account with those suppliers so they can serve those fonts to your site.

We’ve tried to make it easier to publish fonts to your site by creating a handy embed code generator in our app. We’ll automatically set up the kits for any fonts you use from Fonts.com® and Google® Web Fonts and bundle them into your embed code. If you’re a Typekit® customer and you let us link that account to your Typecast account, we’ll set up their fonts too. That’s three providers, one embed code, and no fussy jumping between windows, reselecting typefaces, or tedious set up.

We hope to do the same for Webtype® and Fontdeck® fonts in the future, but until then, you’ll need to set these up manually on their sites and obtain an embed code directly from them.

I use a lot of self-hosted fonts. Will I be able to design with them in Typecast™?

No, our Typecast™ app only includes hosted web fonts for now. But we offer the full libraries of Typekit®, Fonts.com®, Webtype® and Google Web® Fonts, plus a selection of Fontdeck fonts, totalling over 5,900 type families. With so many web fonts to choose from, you might discover a brand new gem to experiment with!

Will I be able to share my Typecast™ work with clients or colleagues?

If you’ve purchased a Team, Studio or Agency plan, then absolutely. You’ll be able to invite anyone to join your team. You’ll just need their email address.

If I invite someone, what will they be able to see and do to my projects?

We developed the feature to help you and your colleagues work together on projects, be they designers, content folks, or developers.

For this reason, anyone you invite will have access to every project in your account, not just a single project. They will also have edit permissions, meaning they can add content to and make changes to your projects. So there are no read-only permissions, and we have no plans at the minute to add permissions controls.

So if you are considering inviting a client, consider whether you are happy for them to see all the other client work you may have in your Typecast projects too.

Why should I give someone access to my projects?

Well, it’s your choice and depends on how you prefer to work. It’s handy, for instance, if you need real content but don’t want to have to do all the typing and pasting yourself. Delegate it. The same goes for keying client copy changes.

How will I save my work?

We keep an identical, live copy of your project running in the background. So every time you make a change, it’s instantly updated on our server. So there’s no need to hit a save button. We save as you go, much like Google Docs does.

We also auto-save a version of your project every 15 minutes and notify you at the top of your screen. You can create versions by hitting ‘Save’ in the ‘Open, Save & Export’ menu. If you ever need to see or roll back to one of these earlier drafts, go to ‘Previous Versions’.

Read about our story or ask us a question @typecastapp.