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What The Font? April 3rd 2005
Picture this, your client has just sent you a logo. It’s wrapped up in a lovely EPS file, and you’re hopeful that it’s a vector graphic that you can use to deliver a wonderfully creative piece that will make your employer very happy with you. And then it happens, right after the Illustrator splash screen goes away, you’re looking at what’s inside. You’re scrolling along the various pieces using smartguides to show you what you want to see. Vector data. Graphics, yes looks good, underlines check, wait… what’s this? An embedded raster graphic sits right smack in the middle of the logo treatment. And what makes it even worse, they rasterized text! (Truly a heretic built this steaming pile of an EPS) A sickening brick hits your stomach like 5 pounds of bad sushi, as you look at it further and it begins to dawn on you. You have no idea what font this is…

I’ve had it happen a hundred times before, you’ll just push back on the client. Saying something to the effect “I can’t use this, it has rasterized text. If I were to use this, you’d have a big white box right in the middle of your logo, covering up your photo treatment.” Usually this is rebutted with, “This is all we have, and we’re not going to pay the logo designer to rework this, can’t you just fix it?”

Traditionally this would leave you with a few options:

• Try to find a font that is similar enough to what the previous designer used, and pray the client won’t notice.
• Trace the font in Illustrator, and hope it doesn’t look too different from what the true postscript would produce.
• Or spend a nice chunk of time using Identifont, answering a billion questions trying to identify which font this assclown used.

But now there’s a new tool, and from what I’ve seen of it so far, it is a godsend. WhatTheFont allows you to upload an image of text, and it will analyze that image. Then automatically make suggestions as to what font it thinks it is! And if it can’t identify the font, you can post it on their font guru forum to have other pros take a stab at it!

Is there a nobel prize for graphic design? Because these guys should get nominated.

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