Identifying fonts

One of the biggest type-related problems a designer can be faced with is trying to identify a font from a printed or on-screen sample. Some faces are easy enough to identify; Eurostyle, Gill Sans, Copperplate Gothic and numerous others can be recognised at a glance. However we've all been faced with examples which leave us scratching our heads in puzzlement.

When this happens there are a couple of online services which can actually make a big difference. The Identifont site (www.identifont.com) tackles the problem by presenting a series of questions designed to help pinpoint the typeface by letterform characteristics. As the user proceeds through the different steps, by answering tailored questions, the results are worked out, and the result is often spot-on. If you already have an inkling of what the font may be you can see a sample by supplying a font name, but it's really the identification process which makes this site one to bookmark.

The What The Font? site (www.whatthefont.com) takes a very different approach to the issue, providing a way to upload a scanned sample or supply a URL for an online sample. Kick the process into life and you'll be presented with the sample chopped up into individual letters along with the server's best guess at what each one is. (This process only works with upper and lower-case characters, not punctuation or numbers.) Click the search button and you're likely to be presented with the answer to the question. This sort of service isn't guaranteed to work, especially if the sample is low resolution or doesn't have many characters. If the What The Font? server doesn't come up with the goods there's also a discussion forum where forum users have a go at identifying the sample for you.

The Identifont site walks through a series of questions covering the many possible identifying characteristics of a typeface and usually manages to come up with useful answers at the end.

Provide the What The Font? site with a clear sample of the font in question and you're quite likely to be given the right answer. If you manage to stump the server you can turn to the discussion forums for help.