Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you
how to identify a font in a logo, like a piece of artwork or a website. And this is something
that I had to do all the time when I worked at a t-shirt company. We had to redraw the logos of
companies that would send us artwork. They would send us a really low res image of their logo,
and that is all they had, so a lot of these small companies don't understand that vector artwork is
very important, and they shouldn't throw it away. A lot of times, they can't even preview that. So,
we spent a lot of our time recreating low res logos for these companies.
And this wasn't really a problem, but fonts are very hard to actually draw with the Pen
tool. So there are other ways where you can just find out what that font is, type it in there,
and then space it out so it looks nice. And I'll show you how. All right, let's get started.
Ok, so I've opened Illustrator, and I'm just going to Create new. I'll come up here to Print,
and then we'll go to Letter and Create. Ok, so here's the logo that I'm wanting to recreate.
I want to know what this font is. I'm going to increase it to where it's a little bit bigger, but
hopefully not too blurry. And then I'll take a screenshot of just this text. So on a Mac,
that's SHIFT CMD and 4. On a PC, it's not going to be SHIFT CTRL 4, but you'll probably have some
sort of screenshot software. So I'm only going to take this first line and that will put it on my
desktop. Now I'm going to drag the screenshot into Photoshop. I want this orange text to be
a little more contrasty, so just a little darker. So I'm going to hit CMD L or CTRL L,
and that will bring up my Levels. I'm going to drag this one all the way to the right.
I don't want it to start encroaching too much into the whitespace. So this will be fine. We'll
say Ok. I'm also going to go ahead and change this to Grayscale. Now I'm going to highlight
just this part of the word and use the levels on that, so CMD L or CTRL L. I'm going to grab that
middle slider and just move it over so the text is a little darker. And we'll say Ok. All right,
now I'm going to save this with CMD S or CTRL S. The next step is to go out on the internet
and go to whatfontis.com. And now we can just drag that screenshot over here onto this blue
area. Now I want it to see these two pieces as separate, so I kind of had to drag that over.
But then we can go on to the next step. We could also mess with the contrast and brightness
here if we wanted to. I don't need to do that, because I did that in Photoshop, so we'll go on
to the next step. Now it's going to ask us to type in the letters that we see. And there's lots of
popups on this site. That's how they make money. So I just always say Ok, but it's free to do this.
And we'll choose Next Step. Now it's going to give us a lot of options of fonts that
are similar to this font. It seems to think that it's rounded, and that's because of that blur.
The higher resolution your image is, the better. Otherwise it throws it off a little bit.
Ok, this one is pretty close, but our logo actually isn't rounded. All of those are
square edges, so I'm going to keep going and try to find one like that.
Ok, this one is very close. And I think this one is the closest, so we can check our system to see
if it has PaysonWF-Bold. If it doesn't, we can ask the client if they have that font. A lot of
times they'll have that on their system if they had a graphic designer create that logo for them.
Then once I have that font, I'll just open up the screenshot, and I can just start typing Home Logo,
then change it to the correct font and then use my OPT and right and left arrows to space between the
letters so it matches this exactly. And usually to do this, I would actually put it right on top
of it like this, and change the color, and then just adjust the kerning so it matches.
Now if you're on the web and you see a font you like, there's a much easier way to recognize
that. And that's with Font Ninja. Font Ninja is an extension so we can come up here to these
three little dots. Go to More Tools. By the way, this is on Chrome, it only works on Chrome. I know
you can get these extensions on other browsers too, but Chrome is what's familiar for me.
Ok, so I'll come over here to Extensions, and I've got Font Ninja right here. And we'll turn this on.
Now if you don't have Font Ninja, you can come up here to Extensions, and open the Chrome Web Store,
search for Fonts Ninja and install it onto Chrome. Now I'm going to come up here to this
little puzzle piece and pin it so that it's right here. Now let's go to the Wall Street Journal for
example, website. Let's say we want to know what this font is. So we can come up here and click on
Font Ninja, and usually it takes this extension a little bit to load. But I can get right over this.
It'll tell me the font name: Escrow Condensed, and the size and everything like that. So
that's a really easy way to identify fonts that are on the web. They do have to be live fonts for
this to work though. All right, if you liked this video, and you want to see more videos like this,
just hit the subscribe button and the little bell next to it and you'll be notified every
time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!