Have you ever wanted or needed to know how to figure out a font?
Sometimes you might lose an original file, whether it be a document, jpeg, photoshop document, etc, and can’t figure out the original font. This has happened to me on a number of occasions… I recently needed to modify an image and opened it to only realize I lost the separate layers on photoshop and couldn’t remember the original font. I have even seen advertisements in magazines and loved the font and wanted to figure out what type it was. Finally I got some moxie, researched, and these tools…
How to Figure Out a Font
The first thing I found in searching was http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
I simply took a screenshot of a document and uploaded the image to figure out a font. You could also take a picture if it isn’t a font on the computer. Just be sure that the font is as horizontal as possible and is at least 100 pixels tall. There is also the option to use an image url to search for a font.
This helpful tool is also very precise in making sure each letter is understood from the image. If the image was difficult to read the letters from and the tool did not choose the correct letter or any at all, you can simply type in the letter yourself to help it decode the original font.
During the few times that I’ve used this, the search results for font have included a few options for the font. This helps ensure you will find the exact original font! I already have this great resource on my bookmarks bar.
Other Resources to Figure Out a Font
Identifont is great tool if you don’t have an example image of the font, but want to figure it out based on what you can remember. You can search by appearance, name, similar fonts, symbols, and even designer or publisher.
Typophile is a forum on which you can post about a font you are searching for and font experts will help you firgure out a font. It would obviously be easier to figure out a font with an image, but this forum works as a great last resource if you were unable to figure out a font with the first two sites I mentioned.
Bowfin Printworks’ website has a very useful font identification tool. The search is based on answering the shape of the glyphs of the font. This is another useful tool if you don’t have an image example but can remember the way the font looked.
Happy Font Hunting!