WordPress Wednesdays–What The Font??

I’ve talked about fonts before, but I wanted to revisit this today.

You may not know, but I am a bit of a fontaphile. I love the massive variety of fonts which are available, and I always notice the styling of characters in movie trailers, TV credits, commercials, posters, and anywhere else. It has always driven me crazy when I notice fonts used inconsistently.

Again, we’ve spoken about this before, but one of the greatest answers to this problem is Google Web Fonts. There are a huge variety of fonts which can not only be easily used through your website, but the developers also offer downloads of the font families so they can be used in any project. This is fantastic news, because it means everything – from the headers on your website, to the web address on your flyers can use the exact same font.

However, for most of you, it may be too late. You’ve already got a logo, other branding, and now you need to produce a new marketing piece. But… what was that font again? I often get logos from clients who’ve had another designer create their logo, and they have no clue what font it is. I’d always recommend that you ask for the name of the font, and make a note of its name with your other marketing materials. You may even want to ask the designer to provide a copy of the font files. If this isn’t an option…

Enter What the Font.com, a site which lets you upload a picture, and it will try to determine which font is used. Basically, you just need some fairly clear letters in a single image, like this:

You upload the photo, and it asks you what each letter is so it can search.

It will then give you a list of all the fonts which match the characteristics of the one you’d loaded. The human eye is the best tool for looking for a match. If none of them match, you’re invited to share your image so other fontaphiles can weigh in on which font this is.

Another great tool for this is IdentiFont.com, which basically asks you a series of questions about the styling of various characters. If you don’t have a large set of letters to compare to, this one can be less exact, but if you have a good sample, this tool seems to work a bit better, I suspect it has a larger library of fonts which it draws from. You may want to try this one out, simply to see the key differences between various fonts. This will give you a better idea of what to look for when you’re searching for a match.

Both tools will also provide information about purchasing the font(s), so you can get a copy of your own.

Hopefully this helps make your branding a bit more consistent.