Plain Notes Are for People With Plain Thoughts. That’s Why I Built FontNotes.

I Couldn’t Find a Notes App With Custom Fonts. So I Made One.

I’ve been a UX/UI designer for over a decade, shipping flows for platforms most people have actually heard of. I’m used to solving other people’s problems inside other people’s constraints.

But every so often I run into a small, dumb annoyance that nobody else seems to be fixing. Last year it was this: every notes app looks exactly the same. Same system font. Same gray boxes. Zero personality.

I looked around for an app that would let me write in a font that actually matched what I was writing. A journal entry didn’t need to look like a grocery list. A big idea didn’t need to look like a Tuesday reminder. I couldn’t find one.

So I took some time off from my other side project and built it myself.

Not Apple Notes. Not Freenotes.

You could compare FontNotes to any of the big note-taking apps. They’re all built to hold text. But that’s kind of the problem: they’re built to hold text, not to let it look like something fun!.

And it’s not like nobody had tried custom fonts before. Freenotes lets you add fonts too, but it’s overly complex, buried under too many steps and settings screens before you actually get to write anything. I didn’t want a feature. I wanted something that felt as simple as opening a blank page.

FontNotes started as a lightweight notes app that let you search and import fonts straight from DaFont, FontShare, ArFonts, Google Fonts, and 1001Fonts, or bring in your own files from your device. No folders to dig through, no font-manager nonsense. Pick a font, write, done.

I posted it on r/SideProject with basically no expectations:

“Could not find a notes app with custom fonts, so I made one myself.”

That was it. No roadmap, no grand vision. Just: this annoyed me, so I fixed it for myself, and figured a few other people might feel the same way.

A few did.

Then People Started Asking for Things

What happened next is the part I didn’t plan for. People started using FontNotes and started telling me what was missing.

So over the following months I kept building, based almost entirely on what people asked for and what I wanted to use myself.

• Widgets, so a styled note can live right on your Home Screen
• Folders, note colors, and borders, so every note can look like it belongs to you
• Localization in 9 languages
• Full accessibility support: VoiceOver, Voice Control, adjustable contrast and text size, all native
• App Lock and 30-day recovery, so a private note stays private, even if you delete it by accident

I posted an update on r/iosapps a while later, mostly out of habit, and it did better than I expected: dozens of comments, mostly requests and

“have you thought about…”

messages that turned into actual features.

Somewhere in there, FontNotes stopped being a weekend fix for my own annoyance and started being an actual app with actual users who cared what happened to it next.

Draw With Your Words

The feature I’m most proud of didn’t come from a request. It came from a dumb “what if” during a coffee break.

What if your text didn’t have to sit on a straight line at all?

Text on Path lets you draw any freehand path on a note, a spiral, a wave, whatever, and your words bend along it as you type. Rotate it, scale it, use any font or color you want, and watch the text update live as you draw. It’s the kind of feature that has no reason to exist in a “serious” productivity app. Which is exactly why it’s in FontNotes.

A Lesson From a Different Project

A few years before FontNotes, I designed an educational platform for students with dyslexia. The biggest lesson from that project wasn’t about fonts at all. It was about clutter: every extra button, menu, or visual element on the screen made reading harder, not easier.

I carried that straight into FontNotes as Focus Mode. One tap clears away every tool and menu, leaving just your note, in your font, with nothing standing between you and the words.

You can read about designing for dyslexia here: https://medium.com/muzli-design-inspiration/designing-for-dyslexia-4eae67c6b113

It’s Not Just an iPhone App Anymore

FontNotes is now available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with your fonts, folders, and styled notes synced across all three through iCloud. Free, No subscriptions, because I don’t think a notes app needs one.

What’s Next?

I’m still building this mostly the same way I started: someone tells me what’s missing, and if enough people feel the same way, it gets built. Right now that means expanding the font library integrations, refining Text on Path, and slowly chasing the idea that a note should look like the thought that made you write it.

Try It Out

FontNotes is free to download on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you’ve ever opened a plain white note to write down something that wasn’t plain at all, give it a try.

→ Download FontNotes on the App Store

→ fontnotes.app

Plain notes are for people with plain thoughts. That’s not you.

Plain Notes Are for People With Plain Thoughts. That’s Why I Built FontNotes. was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.