Have you ever encountered problems in identifying what fonts is being used in an image? Of course fonts being used in popular movie banners can be found easily because you have the keyword but what if you found a free template and the font is not included? You either recreate the buttons with your own fonts replacing the original, or try posting in forums and hope that someone would have seen that font before and let you know what is the font name. There are so many fonts, maybe hundred of thousands fonts available on the internet and to identify an unknown font is definitely NOT an easy task!

If you need to identify a font, don’t despair. I have found 2 methods that is able to help you identify an unknown font. If it is not able to help you identify the font, it will at least help you narrow down to the closest ones.


Identifont, a free service offered to help you identify fonts by answering a series of simple questions about its appearance.

You can identify fonts using a set of restricted letters because sometimes you won’t have A-Z alphabets in an image. Identifont uses a patented expert system containing information about a large number of typefaces, and from this asks a series of questions about key features of the typeface. The system is adaptive, so at each stage the sequence of questions is chosen to identify the font in the smallest number of steps. A typical identification takes about 15 steps, after which it shows the matching font or fonts, together with character-set samples to allow the user to check the answers. Identifont also includes links to the main vendors of each typeface, so the user can order the typeface once they have identified it.

[ Identify Unknown Fonts with Identifont ]

Next is, WTF. WhatTheFont offers different font identifying technology than Identifont. WhatTheFont system accepts image files uploaded by us, then analyzes them and finds the closest match on WhatTheFont site.

Images can be color or black & white, and they don’t have to be very high quality (although that helps). Even a digital photograph of some lettering you like can be accepted. Accuracy of results is unprecedented by previous automatic systems.

[ Identify Unknown Fonts with WhatTheFont ]

Finally, if WhatTheFont system is unable to give you a good match of the font you’re looking for, you can then submit your image to WhatTheFont Forum to have your image viewed by font geeks the world over.