Identifont

Human-Computer Interface

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

posted by Matt Cooper
on 09 July 2007

this project has been
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Picture_14-medium

Tags

fonts, MIT, online, search, typeface

A very useful online tool for finding the font you're after. Its a simple idea and its executed very well. You are asked a series of questions about the typeface you have: what are the serifs like? What shape is the dot above the lowercase i? And it eventually narrows down to a set of potential answers.

Interestingly it can also be used in 'reverse' to suggest typefaces. If you have an idea of the characteristics of a typeface you'd like to use (whether you know it exists or not) you can use this to give you a list of options.


http://www.identifont.com/

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what's been said

posted by Malcolm Garrett
on 02 August 2007

it works well.

it does.

posted by Sarah Boris
on 06 August 2007

myfonts.com is not bad either especially if you want to scan in a mysteriously beautiful font to find out it's name.

It does not work each time though. I wonder how we could contribute to enhance font recognition on these websites. They sure do have odd fonts and to be honest it is surprising to see that these websites aimed at typographers and designers have such an unclear navigation.

They do prove helpful though.

Does anyone know better websites for font background history?

posted by Jane Plüer
on 07 August 2007

Re: typography sites

If you have a lot of time to spare, there is a site that has hundreds of URLs to research fonts:

http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/fonts.html

However, there are a lot of dead links, so it can be a bit hit and miss, but, on the plus side, you'll always find something you weren't looking for!

A good forum to ask type related questions is http://www.typophile.com/ - loads of very knowledgeable people (i.e type geeks) on there ;-)

posted by Malcolm Garrett
on 08 August 2007

Don't forget to try out TypeTester too

http://www.dynamolondon.org/projects/56

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