I am a professional invitation and graphic designer and I LOVE designing invitations and custom print work for my clients. It’s fun. I get to be creative. AND I get to play. One of my favorite things to do is search though fonts and pick out the ones that convey the mood and tone of the graphic design project I’m working on. It can be a daunting task as there are hundreds of thousands of fonts to pick from, and many look very similar to each other. So when a client sends me an image with text or word art and asks for something similar, how do you figure out what the fonts are?
Font Ninja
There are several ways to determine what fonts are being used in a document or on a website. One of my favorites is an extension for your Chrome web browser called Font Ninja. It’s free and can identify any font on any website. You can download the extension here.
When I’m doing branding work for a client, I often ask them to look at other websites. I use those as inspiration and to figure out what they like. When they send me website links, I can easily figure out what fonts are being used by activating the Font Ninja extension. Then, when I start designing for that client, I can easily narrow down font options to fonts that provide a similar look and feel because I know exactly what they are.
Font Search Websites
Another way to determine what fonts are being used in a design is to use a font search website. There are two that are excellent: What Font Is and What The Font.
Both work very similarly: you upload a PNG or JPG file (or on What Font Is, you can also link to the url of an image), you identify the letters in the graphic, and you click “go.” The websites run the image through their algorithms and provide a list of possible fonts that might be in the graphic you uploaded. It is not a perfect process as many fonts are remarkably similar to each other, but these websites usually get pretty darn close.
Get help from other professionals
One last way to determine a what a particular font might be is to ask other design professionals. I am in several professional stationery groups on Facebook and when I need help identifying a font, I ask them. I can upload a screenshot or image into the chat and usually within minutes, I have professional designers from all over the world providing their expertise to help identify the font in question. Some of my favorite stationery design groups on Facebook are:
The Rising Tide Society – Stationers
Stationery Designers Community | The Cultivated Creative
These are all private groups, and you need to request permission to become a member. But they are all invaluable resources and worth the effort to join.
Once I figure out the name of the font(s) I want to use, I always come to Creative Fabrica first to see if it is available for purchase. Creative Fabrica has an extensive library of amazing fonts with commercial licenses. It is a great resource and one of the subscription services I value most in my business.