Identifont -- Identify that elusive font!

April 7, 2004 10:54 AM

Identifont is an amazing, free, font identification tool. Ever seen some nice text in print or on the web, wanted to use it yourself, but couldn't work out what font they used? By answering a series of simple questions (Does the 'Q' tail cross the circle? What shape is the 'g'?), all presented with handy example pictures, Identifont can quickly identify the name of the font you're looking for.
posted by chrismear (13 comments total)

That's great. Another one is WhatTheFont, which analyzes any black and white image scan of an unknown font...
posted by mathporn at 11:03 AM on April 7, 2004

Excellent link! Not truly related, but here is a really great web-based font browsing tool I use if I'm on someone else's machine and they don't have a font management app: STC fontBROWSER.
posted by mosspink at 11:14 AM on April 7, 2004

well, that's crazy - thought this was mefi-worthy myself but i could have sworn languagehat mentioned it in a thread comment once before. guess not. i must have found it on some design- or typography-oriented site elsewhere.

i used this fairly recently to identify this font for a friend; we had a three-word sample from a department logo; he wanted to make t-shirts that would match the logo but needed the font name to give to the screenprinter.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:18 AM on April 7, 2004

Great link chrismear! Very useful to me and it's fun playing with.

I checked the identification process with some fonts I had in my mind and it worked in most cases. Then I selected by "fancy characteristics" and discovered some good fonts that were new to me.

Identifont, welcome to my FireFox Toolbar folder.
posted by tcp at 11:30 AM on April 7, 2004

frogs: You might have seen it on Languagehat itself—I posted it a year ago. It is indeed an excellent resource, and I don't know why I didn't put it on MeFi.
posted by languagehat at 11:50 AM on April 7, 2004

This is hella good, thanks.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 12:09 PM on April 7, 2004

Sweet. Thank you very much. Once I get home I'm going to find out exactly what font is used on a few of my album covers.
posted by sciurus at 12:15 PM on April 7, 2004

Yep, a good resource and just fun to play with. I picked Bodoni as a test, and got it down to 5 choices before the tool bogged down by not allowing for two serif types in this font. But at that point I could click the "5 candidates" link to find it.

sciurus, I can just see it: "Does the tail of the "S" pass through the hole in the "E" to become the tail of the "Y"? Answer: Roger Dean...
posted by soyjoy at 12:20 PM on April 7, 2004

bah! it totally failed to identify this one:


posted by quonsar at 12:38 PM on April 7, 2004

I knew someone who insisted on spelling it as 'fount', as this is actually the original, archaic spelling of the word 'font' (meaning, 'a typeface'), and distinguishes it from the word 'font' (meaning, the religious article with which quonsar stymied Identifont).
posted by chrismear at 1:07 PM on April 7, 2004

Great links, everyone. thanks!
posted by scody at 3:51 PM on April 7, 2004

Great link.
Couldn't identify the MetaFilter logo font, though.
posted by timeistight at 3:08 AM on April 8, 2004

On a related note: has the word font, as it has been misused† in contemporary computing, come to be accepted as a synonym for typeface, excepting among typographers?

† Typeface is, as I understand it, properly understood as what we're here calling font; while a font is a particular variety of a typeface (size, weight, etc.).
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 4:52 PM on April 8, 2004