b.wilhelm » Design

Steve Jobs: 1955 – 2011

Brian Wilhelm — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:35:06 +0000

Online Font Recognition Website Can Save Designers Precious Time

Brian Wilhelm — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 05:13:11 +0000

Occasionally designers have to have a quick way to find out what font is used in an image in order to create complimentary works. Sometimes the original designer or layered file are not always available to make it easy. There is a website that can help.

I have run into this scenario a number of times as a designer – your given a piece of work that you need to base your design off of, and you have a limited time to get your piece finished. There’s no time to get the original file from the original designer, so you have to try guess which font are used in the original, and try to match up yours. This is very time consuming, and granted, lots of graphic designers can pick out some fonts just by eyeballing them, yet there are still other fonts that escape identification. This is where myfonts.com’s WhatTheFont (WTF) tool comes in.

I had a real world use for this just today, where I needed a quick font match for an email, so I tried out the WTF machine. Here is what I did. First, I took a snippet of the font I wanted to identify, pictured here.

The snippet of font I wanted to identify.

On the WhatTheFont site I uploaded my sample and clicked the continue button, which then showed me a series of smaller images that represented the individual letters of my snippet that had been recognized by the tool, as seen below.

WhatTheFont recognizes individual letters in your snippet.

If WhatTheFont doesn’t correctly identify some of your letters, you can change the letter designation in the boxes below each letter image. Once you have confirmed that each letter breakout is correctly identified, then you can continue, after which WhatTheFont shows you what it thinks are the best matches for the font you are trying to identify.

WhatTheFont shows you the closest matches to your font.

And that’s about all there is to it. The service did pretty well matching up the font, but I haven’t tried any script fonts to see how well it performs with a larger challenge. If you use WTF, let me know how it works for you.

New Yahoo Homepage is Annoying

Brian Wilhelm — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:41:13 +0000

I had to write this article after a few months of using the new Yahoo! homepage. Yahoo.com has been my homepage for as long as I can remember, and recently Yahoo introduced its newest revision of the most popular homepage on the web. I have to say they got some of the user experience wrong.

I think my biggest problem with the new yahoo homepage is the left menu navigation. Users of the previous version of Yahoo’s homepage will remember that they were just simple links into the category or section of Yahoo you were interested in. Now, upon rolling your mouse over the links, you are presented with a expanded window of additional information. It becomes annoying when browsing front page new stories on Yahoo.

The issue is most evident when browsing through news stories on the home page. If you click on a news story, read it, then click the back button in your browser to go back to the home page, when you scroll your mouse back down to the news section to click on another story, if you happen to roll over the left menu now, you get one of those expanded view boxes that pop open and block the screen.

An example of the expanded menu experience of the Yahoo Homepage.

As an alternative, you can turn off the left navigation of the Yahoo homepage by clicking the ‘page options’ link and selecting “Switch to Compact View”. This is fine, but I actually like the links on the left, just not the expanded menus that are forced upon me. The compact view goes back to something more resembling the old Yahoo homepage, but its almost like there are miles of difference between the 2 versions. I wish there were a third, middle-of-the-road version that would allow for some hybridization of the two versions.

Update: It appears that Yahoo has listened to all the complaints. They have updated the menus to now allow you to click before they expand.