How to identify fonts
Have you ever seen a typeface, admired or hated it and wondered what it was? You don’t have to have a degree in typography to find out. There are several online tools that can help you, but my favourite is Identifont.
I studied typography as part of my Graphic Design course, and have been a typo geek ever since, but I often cannot recognise fonts (no wonder – there are thousands of them) so Identifont has proved invaluable to me.
Ideally, you’ll need quite a few characters to start with. Log on to the site, and check the ‘Fonts by appearance’ tag. If you don’t have a full alphabet of both upper- and lower-case letters, click on the ‘All letters’ filter and type in what you’ve got. You’ll be asked a series of questions about the characters you have.
For example, I would be prompted to tell Identifont that this is a sans serif face, and be asked questions about individual characters to narrow the choice down. Don’t worry if you don’t know the difference between a serif and sans-serif letter, everything is explained with illustrations. Once you have completed the questionnaire, you’ll be given a choice of possible fonts – or, in the case of my example which is very distinctive, a single answer.
Did you recognise this font? If not, you can now find out what it is!
