How to Identify A Font

Want to identify a font used by certain publications, corporation logos, movie posters, or ad campaigns? Below are a few tools to identify a font or online resources where you can get a font identified.

1. WhatTheFont

WhatTheFont is a font identification tool developed by Myfonts for instant automated identification of the font used in a photograph or scan. The tool is very easy to use yet very efficient. First you upload an image or specify an image URL, then submit and it will try to identify and match each letter in the image, finally it will show you the matching font or a list of similar fonts.

Tips for better results when identifying a font:

1. Get the text as horizontal as possible. Sometimes you may need to rotate the image in an image editor tool first to make it horizontal.
2. Generally letters should be at least 100 pixels tall in the image and the background of letters in the image should not be complex, better in one color.
3. Letters should not be connected together or the tool will think they are one letter. Try to crop one or two letters out of the image and then submit.
4. Choose letters that are distinct to that font. If you can’t decide on that, try to upload different groups of letters or you can simply narrow down and spot the font in the final suggested fonts.

WhatTheFont is great but it can’t handle all font identifications, especially for images of low quality or with distorted letters, etc. Then you can have a look at:

2. Identifont

Identifont is a website that offers you a various ways to find fonts and identify fonts. You can find fonts by appearance, name, similarity, picture or designer. The core feature of it is identifying a font by its appearance. The identification process requires you to answer questions about the key features of sample letters such as sans or sans serif, the style of “Q” tail. As more questions are answered, the system will narrow down the possible fonts and show the popular matches till the exact match. Generally speaking, it is another approach to identifying a font and worth a try.

By the way, the website are rolling out a set of new utilities to help find fonts for specific applications and identify fonts with particular features, such as identifying fonts containing a character with an unusual feature, finding extremely condensed fonts or wide fonts etc.

Due to a lot of reasons, such as designs with modified letters, complexity of script typefaces, limitations of the database and tools, both WhatTheFont and Identifont will not be able to identify certain fonts or even close. At this time, you may resort to:

3. Font Identification Forums

These forums are usually where font experts and enthusiasts hang around, so chances are that you will get your font identified if that font actually exists. You simply post an image of the font in the forum and wait for someone to answer. Yes, you have to wait, for minutes, hours or even days. Sometimes, it may help if you can provide more information about the sample, for example, what is the image? and where does it from? Below are a few popular font identification boards you can have a try.

1.  WhatTheFont Forum from Myfonts
2. Font Identification Board from Typophile
3. Font Identification Forum from Dafont