How to Identify a Font in Any Format

Without realizing it, we are exposed to hundreds of different fonts every day. With all the choices out there, sometimes it’s hard to find just the right font to convey the message you want to express. While struggling to make the right typeface choice, you may find inspiration on a website, in a newspaper, or even in the subway on your way to work. But how can you make use of fonts you see in your everyday life without being able to identify them?

There are hundreds of downloadable fonts, but how exactly do you find the specific one you’re looking for? Luckily for you, there are tools online to help you identify the exact font you like, no matter what format you found it in.

How to Identify a Font in Print

In some ways, the most difficult situation in which to identify a font is when it is printed on a page, poster, or sign. The clearer the text and the more text there is, the better the chance of solving the puzzle. But even if you’ve only got a short snippet or a heading to work with, it’s worth a try!

Even if you've only got a short snippet or heading to work with, it's worth a try to identify the font.

Start by taking a moment to snap a clear, head-on photo if it’s not something you can take with you. If you can (the font is printed in a magazine or on a sheet of paper no one will mind you taking), by all means, hold onto it.

Whenever you have access to the internet, go to Indentifont. This website will ask you a series of questions about the found font in order to attempt to identify it. It will ask about basic features of the font (such as whether it has serifs) and gradually work towards asking about specific characteristics of particular letters. For this reason, the larger the text sample you have, the easier it will be to identify the font. If you only have a few letters, they have an option to enter the letters you do have, as well as give the year of the sample. If it’s an older sample, this one piece of the equation can cut out a large number of fonts designed after your sample was created, but it will have little relevance to anything new.

Why not try it now? Look for a unique font somewhere around you, such as in a magazine advertisement. Use Identifont to try and identify the font.

How to Identify a Web Font

The more code savvy among you might scoff at this, but if you are unfamiliar with HTML, it can be a pain to figure out what particular web font a website is using. Even if you are familiar with code, it can be daunting to dig through pages of code to try and determine what font is coming into play for one particular header. Fortunately, there is a simple tool to do all that work for you.

WhatFont is extremely easy to use. It is available as a bookmarklet, Chrome extension, or Safari extension. Once installed, simply click the button for the extension and hover over the source of your font curiosity. Voilà! The name of the web font appears. To learn more about it, click the text and an information panel will appear, giving the font family, the size, line height, color, and some sample letters. It links to the site where you can buy the font, and also features a tweet button, just in case you want to share the brilliance of your newly-discovered font with your followers.

The WhatFont bookmarklet or extension is extremely easy to use.

Let’s try it out. Locust Street Press is a local printing press company, and they have an adorable website that uses a thin, all-caps, sans serif font. But what exactly is that gorgeous font? WhatFont reveals it to be Ostrich Sans Rounded Medium Regular. Wow, I never knew something with ostrich in the name could look so graceful!

Another tool that works similarly is Fount. Available as a bookmarklet, it works similarly and is perhaps a bit prettier than WhatFont, but doesn’t provide quite as much detail.

How to Identify a Font in an Image

But what if the object of your font desires is not conveniently being served up as a web font? What if it’s being used in an image – how could you possibly identify it then?

Fear not! I’ve got one more tool up my sleeve.

WhatFontIs is a tool that analyzes images and tries to find similar fonts. It can be a little fussy to make work, but it works very well at identifying even tricky fonts. My advice: crop your image closely, make sure it’s dark text on a light background (invert the image colors if you have to – you can use a web editor like Pixlr if you don’t already have Photoshop open) and when it asks you to identify letters in the image, only type them if it has picked out the complete letter.

To better show you what I mean, let’s take this "Remodeling & Renovations" portion of Triple Crown Corporation’s website as an example:

Starting out, I really had no clue what font that was, but I needed to know in order to work on a project for them. I loaded the image into the WhatFontIs tool, and what it first spat back at me was a little discouraging – the cursive font obviously confused the tool, so I could only fill in the letters that it pulled out completely:

The first couple results were pretty useless, but then I spotted it…

There it is: Jeurgen Italic! I followed the link to download the font and tried entering the same text in the preview. Right away I knew it was the same font. And even better, it was free!

Try it out yourself. If it doesn’t work, an alternative tool is WhatTheFont, although despite the catchier name, it hasn’t worked as well in my experience.

When All Else Fails

Sometimes we fall in love with fonts that are incredibly hard to identify. They may be rare, or frustratingly similar to an existing font (but better! I want that one!), or the format they are in makes them particularly hard to sample. (Kinetic type flying across a video, perhaps, or layered over a particularly noisy background that messes with WhatFontIs’ tool.)

If you can’t identify your font, maybe someone else can. Typophile is an extremely active forum catering to typography enthusiasts. It’s a great place to haunt if you want to learn more about type. These people seriously know their stuff, and that’s why many of the samples posted to their Font ID Board get identified – or at least thought-provokingly analyzed – within hours of posting.

Want to improve your own font identification skills? Learning to identify common fonts on sight is an important skill to speed up your design process. FontTrainer is a good place to start; it generates a sentence with each word in a different font and color. Click the words and start identifying. Looking for something slightly more advanced? The Font Game for iOS, though no longer supported, is still an addictive identification game.

Want to improve your own identification skills? Learning to identify common fonts on sight is an important skill to speed up your design process.

I wish you luck on your font identification journey. Got another tool that we could all benefit from? Make sure to share it in the comments below!