Let me first start by saying I have personally used this app 3 times while under pressure to replicate certain fonts for design projects that I was involved with. Whatthefont.com was 3 for 3, and the time and headaches it eliminated makes this web app a must use for any designer because you will run into this issue at least a few times a year. You could go the old route of scouring thru your own fonts to find one similar or heading over to some “font haus” like dafont and trying to locate your un-identified sans serif. Or even better yet, hitting up all your design buddies and asking them to forward the email to everyone in their art dept hoping to find some jr. designer that just happened to use that exact font for his aunt’s anniversary flyers a few months back.

Well those techniques are exhaustive, non-efficient, and frustrating at best and makes for a crappy accuracy rate.

Whatthe%$@! is what i said…

When I ran across this site I figured there was no way it would locate the font for the famous Playbill show books used on NYC’s broadway show circuit. The client really wanted something that resembled a Playbill with a customized creative twist and I figured this project would be some easy beer money until I couldn’t find the damn font. It took me days until I gave up and just started vectorizing the current Playbill font which is a pain in the ass and limits your creative possibilities.

So doing a google search of “font recognition” I stumbled upon whatthefont.com. I’m thinking a web app that will take my uploaded image of the font and decipher what kind it is, yeah right? Well it took maybe 20 seconds to process and “viola” it spit out

Spike Bold™from Quadrat Spike So accurate, so fast. What the hell have I been doing for years?

I’ve been hooked ever since…

Here is a Youtube tutorial explaining it step by step…

And another more complex one…