Have you ever been on a website and wondered “What type of font is that?!” I have. And depending on your interests and area of focus, you may even do it more than the typical Internet user. You could spend hours searching for the font on your favorite search engine, or you could use WhatFont.
WhatFont is a browser extension and bookmarklet that you can enable once you’re on the website with the font in question.
About WhatFont & Who’s Behind It
Like I stated previously, WhatFont is a simple tool that you can use to find out what a type of font is. There are other tools for this as well, commonly used by developers, but they aren’t a quick and easy solution, especially for someone who might be curious, but doesn’t deal with fonts all the time. The great thing about WhatFont is it’s for both types of users.
WhatFont was created by Chengyin Liu, currently an undergraduate Computer Science student. He has several projects going on, which he links to on his personal website. One of those many projects is WhatFont.
The WhatFont page has literally all of the information you’ll need including instructions on how to use it. A couple of examples of the information provided are a test field, changelog, and the contact information of Chengyin, the developer.
Browser Compatibility With WhatFont
Depending on your preferred browser, you can use WhatFont via extension or bookmarklet. The extension is only available for Chrome and Safari, whereas the bookmarklet works for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE and Opera.
Now, if you look at the image above, you’ll see he doesn’t include Opera in the list of browsers that the bookmarklet works in. Honestly, I thought that was odd because I’ve found very few bookmarklets that haven’t worked in a browser, so I tried it out in Opera and as you can see in the image below, it worked fine.
How To Use WhatFont
Using WhatFont is really simple and hardly even needs a section to explain it. After you have acquired it, refresh any already loaded webpages that you want to use it on and click the bookmarklet or extension.
If you hover over the desired font, only the type of font will be displayed. If you click on the font itself, you will get a pop-up with more information such as the font family, size, line height, color and sometimes the origin of the font.
For example, in the image below you can see that the fonts are from TypeKit. You can also tweet out the font if you so desire.
You may also notice that you can click on multiple fonts without losing the previous popup. Simple feature, but smart as you may often want to compare different fonts.
Also note that while using WhatFont, you won’t be able to completely interact with the webpage, except for WhatFont purposes. You can quickly exit out of WhatFont by clicking the button in the top right corner.
Where To Find WhatFont
By now you’ve probably figured out where to get WhatFont. The most direct way to acquire it is through the website, especially for the bookmarklet. I would also recommend this method for downloading the Safari extension. For Chrome, you can head right to the Chrome Web Store and get it that way.
Conclusion
Again, you may not always use this tool, but it’s convenient to have for those times when you would like to identify a font. And it is especially nice for website developers and designers.
What do you think of WhatFont? Have you tried it? We’d love to hear your feedback.
