Help me find a font!

WOW! I've been wanting something like that for years. TYVM Suzy B

By the magic power of Google and typing "indentify fonts online" ,I just found another site similar to identifont, http://www.linotype.com/fontidentifier.html the Linotype automatic font finder.

I will add to to my bookmarks at work tomorrow. Haven't tried it yet.

You guys have got me looking at fonts on Sunday night. Almost had me looking for fonts similar to Helvetica at half past midnight Saturday night / Sunday morning. This is very sad.

So, I just spent at least twenty minutes looking for fonts made from kids playing. Nothing too promising. Maybe you could draw some pictures of the letters as best you can and that might jar someone's memory or help find the right search term to put in a search engine. Also the forum mentioned above would be a better place to post, and the myfonts.com site has a forum to ask at also.

Also, for font id problems, I think you can email the guy that runs BowfinPrintworks.com, which is itself a font id site, and which might be a good place to see what font the menuboard letters are.

I personally think Helvetica Black or it's clones, Switzerland black, Swiss 721 Black, Triumvirate Black, etc. would do fine, though I understand the desire for an exact match. I have to suppress the desire for exact matches all the time at work. The automated systems are a great boon indeed. I've never used any of the font id forums because I need answers in minutes at work, not hours or days. I suspect that this menu board would yield to on of the font id forums pretty quickly. There's probably a signmaker in the forums who remembers ordering letters for those kinds of signs.

Of course one could try looking at some signage sites and seeing what letter styles are offered on their changeable letter boards.

Oh, by the way, myfonts.com has a forum where you can submit pictures of text you want to know the font for and their audience of font obsessed users will most likely be able to identify it.

If I look at a sign and it's in Helvetica, Arial, Comic Sans, Courier, or some other overused font I'm familiar with, it's like seeing someone type "teh" without ironic intent.

Ya, I'm a sucker for just the right look, even on small stuff. It works with my things, though.

I'm a sucker for getting the job done on time.

Spending hour or days looking for "just the right font" is a good way to blow deadlines and lose sleep.

Instead of worrying whether my font is the perfect choice. I'll concentrate on the architecture of the information, font size, color, leading, justification, tracking, kerning, page layout and composition, photography, supporting graphics, proofing, color-correction and prepress.

I'll have the job delivered while you're still hunting through the B's...

Bodoni CE Book ... hmmm, no.

Bodoni CE Condensed... no.

Bodoni CE Ex Bold... I don't think so.

Bodoni CE Ex Bold Ex Narrow... uhhh, no.

In other words, you're doing a completely different kind of work than someone who's building a product in SL, where there's no "architecture of the information", page layout, composition, proofing, and prepress...

Design considerations are remarkably similar whether in sl or graphic design.

Time wasted searching for perfect fonts doesn't change whether your are inworld or out.

On the other hand, using something like Helvetica or Comic Sans instead of spending 20 minutes looking for a matching font when you actually have a font sample in hand is just plain sloppy.

What fiendish beast would ever do that?

Helvetica, maybe.

Comic Sans? NEVER!!!

Artsy fartsy types that can't deal with Comic Sans and Helvetica, hee hee. Living stereotypes!

Somebody comes in the shop and says "I want a sign that looks like this" and shows me a sample of Helvetica and Comic Sans, I say yes and take their money.

I've looked at so many fonts so many times they make me want to puke or kill myself, plus they've all blended in to a big mush in my brain and I can't remember the names of nearly as many of them as I used to. The part of my brain meant for font recognition has filled up and burnt out.

I think the best time for font appreciation was maybe five years after starting in graphics. I'd learned a bunch of fonts and was still interested in them and enjoying them.

The best free font viewer I'm aware of at present is the AMP font viewer. "The Font Thing" used to be the best but it's obsolete; it only does TrueType fonts, no OpenType fonts or other fonts, so it's not really good enough now that so many PC fonts come as otf instead of ttf.

It's a pain having fonts and font clones, and then having multiple types of fonts, and having so many fonts known by the designers name, which means that you have Garamond Elegant and Garamond Classic and American Garamond , and in some cases they aren't the same font at all and it would have been a lot nicer to not have the common word in the name.

When you can't get a machine to determine the font, a good font viewer is a last resort. The Font Thing allows you type in your sample, and then see the sample displayed in multiple fonts at the same time. I wish like heck that Sue Fisher, the author, would have released the source code as open source, so that it could be updated. A nice feature of the font thing is that it built an index of the fonts and created samples, so that when you have to start from A and work your way to the end, the generic samples would appear instantly instead of having a small pause. When you have to look through thousands of fonts, any delay is unacceptable, even a fraction of a second. Another nice thing is to be able to mark the likely candidate fonts, so that when you get to the end you don't find that you forgot the ones you wanted to look at again. Having to write the names down or type them in a list is a drag.

I've had customers who when presented with a choice between Helvetica Black and Times New Roman regular, ask "What's the difference?". I know that in my case nearly all the time I spend picking out the perfect match is time that might as well have been thrown straight in the trash or flushed right down the toilet.

We don't bill people for time spent matching their fonts, which makes it really sad, spending hours trying to find a match when something similar would have suited the customer perfectly well, and not getting paid for it to boot.

Your not a graphic designer, you sound more like a printer. I have been a graphic designer since 1979 and I too could spend a good day or two finding the right font/s for the job. Hand drawn lettering was my speciality, producing fonts for Le Piat D’or (wine); Croft (brandy); French Connection; Nicole Farhi and Marks & Spencers (fashion), which at the time pre Apple Macintosh, all being produced on the drawing board manually.

I was even paid to kern full fonts, which was done by hand and then mathematically translated into the digital fonts themselves, a project like this could take two solid weeks at between 12 and 14 hours a day.



I would refuse to work with them if they wasn't willing to take my advice on typography. Friends I shared a studio with would do this, and they had far more customers than me, but I always made more money, and eventually I would end up with their customers, because they were not happy with the results.


Ahhh just saw this, but I did

Will you marry me?

I can assure you, I am a graphic designer.

One that just has his head on straight. That's all.

How nice for you to enjoy that luxury.

Comic Sans is entirely appropriate for certain kinds of ads because people *expect* Comic Sans in certain types of ads.

LOL, guess how many bad graphic designers I have met in 30 years who think they are good?

Why I'd just REFUSE THEIR BUSINESS!

Yup, that's what I'd do!

Didi I say anything about being good?

*Yawn* It's a living.

I work in a one day sign shop. We get 24 hours from the time the order is complete until the finished product is due. On good days, which we aren't having too many of lately, we might get thirty orders, each of which might be for one item or perhaps 15 different items, some being plain text and some might have multicolored logos on them.

The choice of fonts is intended to be done at the time the order is made, i.e. the customer picks the fonts, or they leave a sample. The copy is determined by the customer and the order taker.

I'm an employee, not the owner. If I balk at using Helvetica and hold up the production process by doing so, I will be fired. I have no savings, but a bunch of fixed expenses. I can't afford to do much in the way of correcting stupid wording or lousy designs. I don't get any increased pay if I do an outstanding job, or even care. What I have to do is make sure my output matches the work order.

There are some things that are so atrocious that you know that most customers would object even though you gave them exactly what they asked for. One example of this is if someone asks for a whole bunch of text all in uppercase in a font like Shelley Allegro. It will look hideous and be unreadable, and if we make it that way, we'll probably end up making it again at no extra charge, so I try to stop that from happening.

Some of the order takers are really stupid, and in addition, act even stupider than they really are so they can avoid having to learn things or do any work beyond the absolute minimum required to keep their job. An example of this is one order taker who can't scale a sample that's 2 inches tall by 4 inches across up to 3 feet tall by X feet across. They take the order to reproduce the 2x4 sample in a 3 ft by 15 foot shape without discussing things like line breaks or even thinking that they are agreeing that the store will do something that is physically impossible.

This particular order taker has worked there for years and doesn't know what RGB stands for. If you try to teach her something she just flutters her arms and walks away.

We don't get to do much in the way of creativity. An example of this would be: the orders almost always show the copy in the order of most important to least important. That's a fine way to think of the copy, but if you want to make a good looking sign, it's often best to put the most important in the middle, with the less important things above or below it. The designers can't make this choice. If they customer likes their decision, the customer is happy, but the store gets no extra money, and if the customer doesn't like it, we have to do it over for free because we didn't follow the work order.

So, there's more than one type of business where the workers are called "Graphic Designers." Some actually get to create designs, and others are more at the output end of things.

Will you marry me... before you kill yourself?

I like reading your posts.

I guess if a job's not worth doing it's not worth doing well . . .

Pep (Do you do your own PR too?)