Learn and improve your type skills with these fantastic freebies.
One of the most common questions you see posted on design forums is “Can anyone identify this font?” But before bothering a human, we’d urge you to first try one of these automated font identification services. They’re by no means infallible, but they should at least provide you with some handy hints to get you further on your way.
First launched by MyFonts in 2011, WhatTheFont is a free iPhone app for identifying the fonts in a photo, print ad, poster or web graphic. Take a picture with your phone and the app will tell you what font or fonts are being used in it. There’s also a browser version of the app.
Drag and drop, upload or paste an image URL to scan its fonts
Font Squirrel offers a free font identification service called Matcherator. Just drag an image onto the box (or add the image URL) and it will ask you to crop in on the area containing the text. Once you’ve done that, Matcherator will identify fonts that match your image, and where you can get them from.
Identifont has a huge, free to use, library of fonts
Since its launch in 2000, browser tool Identifont has been allowing you to identify fonts in a huge variety of ways. The world’s largest independent library of digital fonts and font families on the web, it allows you to identify fonts by appearance; to find fonts by name; to discover picture or symbol fonts; and to search for fonts by designer or publisher.
Just hover and click on web page text to see the font used
Not to be confused with WhatTheFont (number 11 in this list), the WhatFont tool is the creation of Chengyin Liu, an engineer at Airbnb. It’s a quick and easy way to find what fonts are used on a web page without all that tedious mucking about in Firebug or Webkit Inspector. Just install the Chrome or Safari extension and then click the WhatFont button on any web page to find the information you require.
Type Sample is a tool for identifying and sampling web fonts that’s currently being built by Justin Van Slembrouck and Paul Barnes-Hoggett. Anyone can use the bookmarklet and save three samples for free, but to save an unlimited number, it's $5 a year. Either drag the bookmarklet up to your bookmarks bar, or install the Chrome extension to get started.
Next page: Free typography cheatsheets
Get the Creative Bloq Newsletter
Daily design news, reviews, how-tos and more, as picked by the editors.
Thank you for reading 5 articles this month* Join now for unlimited access
Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
