5 Useful and Free Font Identifying Tools to Identify That Font
When it comes to designing in this modern day and age, it’s crucial to have the right font whatever you’re designing. Whether it’s promotional work that needs the right font for the right audience; it could be a website that needs to represent a brand and many other examples. Modern design relies heavily on your website having the right font and so being able to find font inspiration is key.
Here at Geeks Zine we have made this task a little easier for you by going out of our way to find 5 tools to identify that font that you’ve seen on a website and want to replicate in your work. This is really useful for both when you’re out looking for the right font, or even when you’re just casually browsing and find a font you want to know and save to note for later. So here are 5 tools to identify that font.
WhatFont – Free
When it comes to ease of use, there’s few tools that are easier to identify fonts than WhatFont. WhatFont is a Chrome extension that you can download that then works similarly to how to Mac OSX’s definitions for words work. Basically, once it’s installed, when you highlight on a font, the extension will cause a pop up to hover over the selection of text which then shows you the font within that selection. WhatFont gives you information on the size of the font, the font style, the font color and even the option to share the font via Twitter if that’s something you feel the need to do. As aforementioned, it’s a really easy tool to use and one that makes finding that font you’ve found on the web really quick to research.
WhatTheFont!
WhatTheFont takes a completely different approach to finding the font that you want. WhatTheFont is a page itself in which you upload an image of the font that you’ve found, so this is most likely to be a screenshot, however it could be an image sent from a client for you to use. Then you upload the image to the site and WhatTheFont! will show you fonts that match or are similar to that font that can be seen in the image. It’s a clever technique, and as aforementioned, a super useful tool if you’re often commissioned to create something and the client sends you images of ideas of what they want it to look like.
Quora
Quora may be more well known as the Yahoo answers for serious questions, but it also has a category dedicated to fonts in which you can ask people to identify a font for you. Within the category, there are also articles and questions to others about fonts, so if you have an interest or are looking for inspiration within the font-space, then there’s no better place to look than Quora. Quora obviously has a huge following and backing and therefore you’re likely to get a fairly rapid response to your query.
Once again, this may not seem like an obvious choice for discovering that pesky font, but Reddit has a dedicated subreddit for people looking to identify a font. This works similarly to Quora in that you upload your font or ask people within a post on Reddit and people will reply with useful suggestions and answers. What’s good about this technique is that Reddit has a huge offering of people using it and so you’re likely to get an answer back within 24 hours of posting the font, especially with a dedicated moderator often answering the queries himself.
FontEdge
FontEdge works similarly to some of our other offerings in that the process of identifying your font relies on you having an image of the font that you can then upload. However, FontEdge takes it to a more interactive level by cleverly processing the image so you can then select individual letters within the image and then FontEdge will show you the font for these letters. It’s a really good technique and without a doubt the best tool if you’re looking to identify multiple fonts within one image as you can select text from each font separately.
Summary
We hope we’ve helped you find some great tools to identify those fonts. We know here at Geeks Zine how important it is for designers to find the right font for their work and a lot of the time, it’s a case of doing your research to do so. However, these tools also help you when you’re sent details from a client and wish to use the font they want also, so overall we would hope at least one of these tools will help you identify that font.
