April 22, 2012 - Comments Off on Find a Font online
I've been using What the Font for several years to find fonts for graphics my clients send me. "We have a logo, but it's a tiny jpeg." I rebuild (vectorize) clients' logos pretty regularly, since even resizing for the web can make them blurry.
Today I downloaded some iPhone and Android template PSDs, and saw a new "font finder" website at whatfontis.com. Curious, I tested it with a pair of jpegs I used last week to find a font. I'm sticking to WhatTheFont.com
Font-finding Tests
1. JPG one:

What The Font: Pre-loaded the correlating letters, lots of errors and split-images (drag them over each other to combine). Showed five fonts*, none of which were correct. Fail, but I didn't have to work too hard to know it had failed - see below.
What Font Is: Failed to load image. Repeatedly. Fail.
2. JPG two (inverted for clarity):

What The Font: Pre-loaded the matching characters, 90% correct. Showed me 5 fonts, with the correct one first. The next four were all the same font with different names. Win.
What Font Is: Didn't pre-load correlating letters; lots of split images. Showed 100 fonts, none of which were correct, starting with "Duck Duck No. 2" and "Cooper Black." Cooper Black, I tell you! Hard Fail.
Summary
WhattheFont processed both my images, gave me short lists, and found the font.
WhatFontIs only processed one image, gave me a giant list of bad matches, did not find the font.
What The Font has a funny name. "What the FONT?!"
WhatFontIs has an anti-grammatical name that would work if it was on an Italian TLD (ie: "whatfontis.it")
* WhatTheFont allows linkable results. Useful for blog posts, and presenting options to clients. Links EXPIRE quickly.
What Font Is has no linkability, But I can save the list of 100 wrong fonts to my account, if I had one... No thanks.