WhatTheFont?

Pretty cool: A client wanted to use a font exactly like a font they had spied in another site’s banner image. I had no idea what it was. Got thinking there must be some kind of font recognition service out there. I was thinking like a forum of fontography fanatics you could pay to analyze an image for you. Googling “What’s that font?” took me to myfonts.com/WhatTheFont, which let me upload the JPEG image directly. Seconds later, it had broken the JPEG up into constituent letters and asked me to fill in the blanks for the ones it couldn’t guess. Two seconds after that it spit back 14 possible matches – and the first few hits were dead on.

Of course, the top suggestion turned out to be a $240 font they were ready to sell me on the spot. But the second suggestion was so close as to be virtually indistinguishable. And available free.

Is there nothing that infernal interweb can’t do?

Music: Frank Zappa :: The Gumbo Variations

3 Replies to “WhatTheFont?”

  1. It seems to have real problems if the background isn’t plain. I tried it with the title of my book, and it didn’t come close. Also got almost none of the letters recognized.

    It’s still a cool thing. :)

    -JIm

  2. Famous web design trenches quote:

    “We’d like more fonts.”

    “How many more do you want?”

    “How many do you have?”

  3. @Jim: I guess that stands to reason (that it would do better with plain backgrounds). I got lucky – the image I needed to process was fairly plain, and the font not too obscure. In those conditions, the algorithm performed spectacularly.

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