Have you ever noticed a nice font or typeface and thought "I'd love to use that on my next book cover"? The problem, of course, is identifying the typeface that you saw.
I never cease to be amazed at how many different "hats" we need to wear as indie authors. There's our writing hat of course and a marketing hat that gets a fair amount of wear. But perhaps the hat that's most difficult for many authors to fit into is the designer's hat.
In the course of self-publishing a book (or ebook) we need to make some decisions about typefaces, color schemes and layout. And not just for the content... but also for the book cover and related web site pages too. Fortunately for those who don't have a background in printing or graphics design there are some good resources available online. And in this post I want to look at identifying fonts (typefaces). Here are 3 free tools you can use.
This tool is so easy to use. Simply upload an image containing the font and you will get instant feedback on the closest possible fonts. If you don't have an image to upload you could take a snapshot with your camera, or take a screenshot with a tool like Lightscreen. Try to upload an image that has letters on one line only. The letters should not be touching each other and preferably around 100 pixels in height. I have found that if the letters on your sample are too small enlarging the entire image to a larger size sometimes works, even though the quality of the image reduces. If you don't find the right font, try posting the image in their forum to see if any of their font experts can identify it.
This tool is useful if you don't have an image of suitable size and quality. It finds the font by asking you a series of questions about the font.
www.identifont.com/identify.html
This may be a small one-man layout design company, but there are a couple of tools for identifying serif and sans-serif typefaces. It's similar to Identifont but you answer all the questions on one page then search for the result.
The first two resources above are also helpful for locating where you can purchase a particular font or even finding out where you can download it for free, if it's a free font.
