How to find out the name of a font

Have you ever seen a font you really love but are unsure what it actually is? Yesterday I ran into an issue where I had a logo created by a contractor who is long gone and I needed to know what font he used in the logo. How hard could that be? Well after about ten minutes of searching I quickly realized there are way more fonts in the world than I ever realized and that I didn’t know enough about this space to do a keyword search to find my mystery font.

Tiring of a manual search I wondered if there were any free tools on the web to help identify fonts. One quick Google search and voila, I found WhatTheFont, a free tool on myfont.com which quickly found my font with a minimal amount of work for me. All I needed to do was upload an image of the font in question, so in my case I stripped out the word in the logo and saved it as a png file. I then uploaded and the site tried to identify what the image was saying. In my case it guessed 100% correct, but in case it was unable to, the sites gives you the ability to tell it what the word(s) say by overriding their guess. Once I had completed that, WhatTheFont gave me a list of guesses for what my mystery font was and sure enough its top/best guess was exactly what I was looking for, this tool was a lifesaver!