So you have seen a graphic online that is using an awesome font? Maybe you want to find out what that font is ““ or at least a free alternative to that font so you can use it yourself. For Whatfontis, all you need is an image of the font or the image’s URL to identify the font.
There are lots of uses for this tool and it is a great tool to have handy.
We will walk you through using the web application but first we will navigate to the website using this URL. When you arrive at their homepage you will see a screen like the one below:
We can either browse for a local file to use (the file size is 1.8MB maximum.) using the browse button. We can also type in the direct URL of the image anywhere on the Internet. As a tip to find the location of a image on the web we can right click on it and copy the image location. You can then paste this into the box that says Or specify a URL with the image.
You can see how the file name appears after browsing to it below:
But as a test I decided to go after the web logo of MakeUseOf.com. I found the image’s URL and plugged it into the box as you can see below:
We will need to tell Whatfontis some of the letters that it sees. We will see the following screen:
They will want you to type in what letter is in each box. If you see a box with half of a letter you can drag it to its other half to complete the letter. You can then type in what the letter is.
For example the last letter in the list is a m so you can type a m in the box to its right. Next we see the fourth letter in the second row is the top of the letter F and the next box is the bottom of it. So drag one of them to the other and release. Now type in a F.
I then clicked continue and almost instantly this screen was returned. It identified a lot of fonts that kind of matched what I was looking for. But on closer inspection I realized all the ones I was seeing cost money and were for commercial use.
Now what if I want a free font? After all we are all MakeUseOf.com readers and we love free stuff right? So there is an option to choose below where we input our file or URL that allows us to choose between all fonts, commercial fonts or only free fonts.
After selecting only free fonts I got a much better list as you can see below. Some of them do not match exactly but there are a lot of good options like Berlin Email Semi bold Bold (option 3 below).
You can click on the font’s name to download it! What a great tool!
In the past we have looked at other applications like IdentiFont which does something similar. You can check that out here. You can also check out some other font posts that we have done in the past such as how to create your own Windows fonts, 2 free font making tools, installing fonts on Windows, Mac and Linux and 5 sources to download free fonts.