tools to quickly identify the fonts you need
Finding the right font to either imitate a brand or logo name or picking up a good typeface from an image around the net was once deemed impossible and can only be done by manually looking at the font’s graphical structure, which is mostly done by font experts, so you’re in bad luck if you don’t get answers right away.
However, with the dawn of the new technology today, the path of computer vision and searching by image has been finally opened.
In Here are a few sites and/or tools to quickly identify the fonts you need.
List of Sites to Quickly Identify the Fonts you need
WhatFontIs
This website allows you to search a font’s name by any image you upload or link to the site. Browse the image from your computer or enter a URL that links to the image. Select one of the two options: whether your background color is lighter or darker than the character’s color. Next, manually input each character as shown from the image. Select which types of fonts you want to display (commercial, free or all). Click Continue and it will display which fonts match your image.
What The Font
This site works the same as WhatFontIs, and also shows you guidelines on what should the text look like, such as rules on spacing, character height, and that the characters should be as horizontal as possible, with a height of about 100 pixels. The great thing about this site is that it already detects which characters are included in your fonts, and only leaves the characters that it is not sure of behind for you to fill out (don’t worry, you can edit everything in the text boxes as well). This website also has an iPhone app that allows you to take pictures and identify the font right from the app itself. The only downside is that What The Font gives you less suggestions than WhatFontIs.
Identifont
If you prefer a basic and manual way of searching for fonts, then Identifont is the one to go with. You can search for fonts by the following criteria:
- Appearance: whether your font has spikes/slabs (Serif) or not (Sans Serif), or you are not sure and other distinguishing features afterwards.
- Name: just type the name or part of the name.
- Similar Fonts: type the name of a font that is similar to the font you are searching for.
- Picture or Symbol: if you are looking for dingbats (fonts with pictures and symbols), use this to search for your font.
- Designer or Publisher: search for the font’s designer or publisher, if you know about it.
The only downside is that it doesn’t identify a lot of fonts, only the famous ones.
Notes about the Websites:
The above-mentioned websites (WhatFontIs and What The Font) only detects common fonts, and may have difficulties when detecting fonts that are rare or quite similar to many fonts. Image quality is also a requirement because your font maybe mistakenly identified due to lack of image quality. In that case, just consult manual experts in detecting fonts.
Font Finder Firefox Add-On
This is a great add-on if you want to find the font that a website uses. Just select the text and the add-on will do its thing, and also give you information about the CSS structures and styles on the website.
Other Font-Identifying Websites
Bowfin Print Works – this lets you specify what the font visually looks like, by most distinguishing letter parts. For example, you’ll specify if your letter a’s peculiar shape or the tails of the letters g and y, and so forth.
Flickr Groups: Typeface Identification – is a Flickr group where you can submit images and let people identify what font it is. This is the last resort if you can’t really find the font you’re looking for.
