WhatTheFont is That?
Have you ever seen a really well designed poster or website and wondered what font the designer used?
This happens to us all the time. So when we heard about WhatTheFont, a free service that identifies various fonts through a tool on myfonts.com, we just had to have one of our designers check it out.
We asked Alecia McEachran to give it a go and tell us what she thought. Here's what she said:
I don't care for WhatTheFont too much because I rarely have any luck with it working.
First, you have to crop the text out and make sure you have a small enough file size, otherwise you get an error. You also have to have a perfectly clean image with dark text and a clean background for it to work and even then I seem to have trouble more often than not.
It doesn't seem super practical because when I'm truly puzzled about a font and need to find out which one it is, I don't typically have a perfect image or even several distinct letters to go off.
Another problem is that if the letters are too close together, it doesn't work either because it tries to separate the image into individual letters and if it can't, it just groups several letters together. I've also noticed that png files don't seem to work like they say.
There are just too many factors that have to be just right for it to work as it should.
Shoot! We really thought we were onto something and were disappointed that the service wasn't up to par, so we asked Alecia if she knew of any other sites. Here are some other competitor sites she named:
https://www.fontsquirrel.com/matcherator
https://www.fontspring.com/matcherator
And her favorite?
I prefer to use http://www.identifont.com/identify.html since I can manually answer questions myself, although it's pretty hard to determine what font something is if you only have a couple letters. It works best if you have a wide variety of letters or at least several distinct ones.
