Consider three scenarios
- Scenario 1: “I want to use the same exact font.. that is present on this website ( some website url would be given )”
- Scenario 2: “I want to use a good looking font on my website”
- Scenario 3: Client sends across an image captured by his camera or some magazine & tells you to use the same font as used in the said object.
I come across such scenario’s regularly and would like to take time out today to explain how I resolve each of these scenario’s.
Scenario 1: More than often, I have heard these statement from my clients. To resolve the first issue, one needs to go to the said website and identify the font using inspect-element method of chrome, or dig deep in CSS of the website to find the font used. However with WhatFont, this task has become very simple. Just go visit the website and click the element and WhatFont easily identified the said font for you. It even specifies the line-height, font-size and color used in the website. Pretty cool. Go get yourself these extension today from the chrome store.
Scenario 2: Finding a good font-combination for the website and at the same time getting it approved by client is not an easy task. There are many great font-combinations out there and finding a perfect solution that would do justice to design as well as your client can be difficult. The way I like to approach these problem is I show them various font-combinations and suggest them which font goes with which. Sites like http://www.typ.io/ & ifontyou.com make it easier for clients to select a particular font-combo for their site.
Scenario 3: This scenario is bit tricky and if you don’t know your font’s properly or the font language, it will take a lot of time to find a particular font of your choice. I highly recommend you to check out Anatomy of type to understand typeface and various concepts related to a type. Differentiating between serif and sans-serif is very primitive. In order to identify a font from photo wherein only few characters are present correctly, you should be well aware of the anatomy. Once you are familiar with ascender , descender, baseline, aperture, cross bar, hairline etc , you can try using WhatTheFont service to check whether it is able to easily identify your font. If not, you would be required to use Identify Font by answering to several sets of questions to narrow do your font’s choice to few tens which you can easily browse and select the one that matches closely to the one present in image.