B2EVO

Seen a font in use and want to know what it is?

Ever wonder what font they used while reading your favorite magazine, or after seeing a commercial?
I certainly did. And I remember spending hours on the internet looking through font databases for one particular font which I saw in a TV commercial.
In most of the cases I didn’t find what I was looking for and that if I was lucky enough to remember what the font looked like after bombarding my visual memory with hundreds of fonts.

Those days seem to be over nowadays. There’s a new tool on the block, which is free to use. The website can be found here and it’s called What The Font.

On top of that it can also be used on your iPhone. You take a picture of the font that caught your attention, upload it on the website and in the matter of seconds you know WHAT font was used.
I don’t know if this can be done in seconds because I don’t have an iPhone.
Therefore I should stick only to the PC version.

Before you begin your font identification there are some tips you should take in consideration.

Try to get the text as horizontal as possible.
Letters should be around 100 pixels tall in your image.
Make sure letters aren’t touching each other.

The program accepts a maximum of 50 characters per image. Use characters that are unique to the font you’re trying to identify. Since we’re stuck with the PC version the next tip can be done with ease – space characters apart more than normal.

Max image size is 400,000 pixels (width x height).
There are some recommendations for image sizes, like so:
120 x 1666 pixels - ideal max size for images containing text with NO descenders.
160 x 1250 pixels - ideal max size for images containing text with descenders.

If you scan the images they should be scanned at 300dpi.
The recommended format is TIFF.

What’s a descender?
In typography, a descender is the portion of a letter in a Latin alphabet that extends below the baseline of a font.
For example, in the letter y, the descender would be the “tail,” or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the v created by the two lines converging.

Enough talking let’s see it in action now.
First, I made an image of 572 x 104 pixels using MS Paint and typed: My font should be using ‘Franklin Gothic Medium’ for font. Then I uploaded the TIFF image to WTF and here’s the result.

The suggestions were not good at all as you can see in the image above.
I didn’t respect some of the tips mentioned above and therefore the result was not quite good.

So, I tried one more time. Only this time I used an image of 921 x 133 pixels, two spaces between letters and input both lower and upper case letters, also some numbers. Here’s the array I used:

A  a  B  b C  c  1  5  G  g  Y  y

This time the result was flawless. The program recognized my font right from the start.