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.

b.wilhelm » fonts

Online Font Recognition Website Can Save Designers Precious Time