What The Font?

OK, so you've got this client who has this huge book of, like, every single logo ever made in the history of the world. Every page has like 20 or 30 logos on it.

"I want THIS font!" he says.

"It's sexy!", he says.

"It says I Mean Business! and Call Me Right Now!"

So you look at the font and it looks kinda like Helvetica, but has serifs like Bodoni, but descenders like Zapfino.

Well, here's what you do: You scan in the letters of the logo and go to WhatTheFont.com, submit your image, and then the fun starts.

In fact, you can even submit a url. That's cool. I did it with their own logo and it looks like they are using "Softie".

They have some crazy programming take your image, probably trace it and then give you examples of what they think the letters are.

They've taken your scan and isolated each letter, and ask you if they've guessed the letter correctly.

You agree or type in the correct letter and they give you a list of possibilities.

They even have this cool thing where you can click to keep the image in the window as you scroll, for like when they give you a bunch of examples, your original image follows down the examples as you scroll through them so you don't have to go back up to the top to check if it's a match. Very cool.

Then you can purchase the font right on their website. Very nice.

This has saved me a few times, and made me look like I knew what I was talking about.

"Oh, yeah, that's Psycho Bold!" I say with complete confidence. I can do what you want. Then I'm the hero. That's fun.

Here's instructions from their site:

WhatTheFont supports most common image formats, for example GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP. The maximum image size is around 360 x 275 pixels. The ideal letter height for the best search result is about 100 pixels. Try to get the text horizontal and make sure letters are not touching. WhatTheFont will only recognize uppercase and lowercase letters.

WhatTheFont is a feature on MyFont.com, which is a subsidiary of BitStream.com. Not sure if that means anything to you, but I thought I'd give them some credit.

Hope this helps.

What do you think?
1. What's your favorite font?
2. Have you made your handwriting into a font?
3. How crazy was your craziest client?