  Magnetic materials and liquid crystals are examples of materials with
orientational order which give rise to textures whose complexity is as
beautiful as challenging to study. Their confinement in curved layers causes
the emergence of geometry-induced effects that are not usually observed in flat
layers. In this paper we draw a parallel between ferromagnetic and nematic
shells, which are both characterized by local interaction and anchoring
potentials. Although similar curvature-induced effects (such as anisotropy and
chirality) occur, the different nature of the order parameter, a vector in
ferromagnets and a tensor in nematics, yields different textures on surfaces
with the same topology as the sphere. In particular, on a spherical shell the
textures of ferromagnets are characterised by vortices with integer topological
charge, while the textures of nematics may admit also half-integer charge
vortices.
