I bet that I’m not the only one which stumbled upon a great typographic illustration and wondered what font the designer used in it. This can turn up to be extremely frustrating especially when you really need that font and you know that if you give up and use an alternative, your design will suffer.
So, what can we do if we don’t know what font was used in an image? The answer is so simple that most of us don’t even think about it: we use a font identifier software.
One of the best online tools for finding out a font is whatfontis.com. It is fast, easy to use and last but not least, free to use. Let’s make an experiment to see how this process works.
First of all we will choose an image. In order to see if the system really gave us the right font, I will create an illustration written using “Proxima Nova”, a premium font: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/marksimonson/proxima-nova/
Now, let’s go to whatfontis.com and upload the image. As you can see in the image below, we can also search for the font if we know the name, but that’s not the case.
In the next step, the system will ask us to input the black characters. This is a way of reducing the list of possible fonts to only the most similar ones. Now, as we can see, there are some boxes which form letters only if we mix them up together. This happens only when the font contains some particular details, you can see the result in the second image.
Below you can see the image after the letters are ordered.
In the next and final step, the system will return the best results. As you can see, the search was a success because it was a perfect match.
Even more, you can see alternative fonts, prices and also links to where you can buy them.
As a conclusion, whatfontis.com is a great tool to identify font, search for alternatives and even buy them. I believe that it’s an important asset to every designer who wants to be ready for any challenge.