Font Finder

Posted on May 30, 2008

Have you ever wanted to identify what kind of font was used, say in some company logo or website? Perhaps you are working on your own design and have seen a font in usage that you know would be just perfect, but don’t have a clue what it’s called. Normally, you either find a font site and go to browsing for a close match or else view the fonts on your computer and try to pick it out from there.

Chances are you will meet with minimal success unless there wasn’t much initiative by the creator to go beyond the standard basic fonts. If you browse a huge font site, it is like looking for a needle in a haystack to find even a close match.

Well, there is hope and I wish I had found this site previously as I had just such an occasion sometime back. WhatTheFont? is dedicated to helping you locate that missing font. You enter the path to the image on your computer or provide a URL to the image file online.

WhatTheFont then scans the image looking to pick out the font characters. It then places each letter that it thinks it recognizes in a box. You correct the letters that are wrong, submit the entries and in seconds, get back a list of the closest matches showing your image text in that font.

I have used in the example below, the Adobe logo, which I did not reproduce on this page. As you can see there are a number of fonts that are very similar. However, if you need an exact match, careful comparisons show that, in this case, the answer is Myriad.

I have tested a few logos and found the results to be very good in most cases.

While the site may appear a little dated, it accurately does its work.

Now it’s your turn…