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Posts Tagged ‘text’

Font Discovery Services for Designers

13 Dec

As web and graphic designers, fonts play an increasingly bigger role in our work. Sometimes, a client gives us a logo that’s really just a 200 pixel wide jpeg image rather than a true vector based logo. The task of figuring out what font is used in that logo used to be tricky, if not impossible.

Thankfully, the surge of web based design tools benefits this situation, and there are a few font discovery services available online that can save hours of work looking for a specific font.

First, let’s talk about how these sites work. Usually a file of with your font is uploaded (or linked via a url) to the site, then scanned to find glyphs that match a font. This only works with letters with spacing, so sometimes a bit of Photoshop work needs to be done to separate letters that have been kerned and tracked very closely together.

Once your image is uploaded, a list of the closest fonts is given, usually with links to either download or purchase the font.

For the What the Font service from MyFonts, the first step is to upload or link an image. Then comes the character selection screen, where your image shows up split into as many characters as the site can see, with a text box beneath.

If it’s an easy one, What the Font will have these character boxes filled in with the correct letters, although the user is supposed to make sure the text box is the character highlighted in the image before going to the last step.

Character boxes are supposed to be left blank if no valid character is highlighted from your font, so that the system doesn’t pick up the wrong font. Testing a few logos on here, What the Font did a good job of finding the correct font, but only with separation.

In my experience the system works about half the time, of course this is totally dependent on your file, but What the Font did miss some widely used (and well spaced) fonts from some of the samples I tried. What the Font does have an iPhone app available, where users can bring font discovery with them on the road.

The WhatFontIs service is very similar to What the Font in the way it works, but they’ve added one little touch that seems to help a lot: the ability to select if an image is on a dark background where the image is inverted prior to processing.

This lets darker images and logos be used. One of the best things about WhatFontIs is that on the results page the font matches are shown with the characters selected, creating the word you were looking for in a list of possible font matches. This is very similar to the way well known free font directory DaFont allows most fonts to be previews with a word or phrase.

The service itself seemed to perform at the same level as What the Font, but interestingly enough the results on some of my test images returned a completely different lists of font matches. There’s also a selection to look for just free fonts, commercial fonts, or both.

These two font discovery tools are very useful for web and graphic designers that need to quickly and efficiently find a specific font for a project. What has your experience been with font discovery services?

 
 

Useful Collection of Cheat-Sheet Desktop Wallpaper for Web Designers

07 Oct

Typical cheatsheets tend to be over-sized documents, far too large to be viewed in its entirety on a desktop and not too handy for the super-fast reference that is needed. To get the full benefit of any cheatsheat, your only real option is to print it out and keep it close at hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easier way, a quicker way. Of course there is – what good be handier than having a cheatsheet set as your desktop wallpaper? Always there for quick reference, no need to print it out and no need to scroll through an over-long document.

In this post we have rounded up a selection of cheatsheet wallpapers, in various sizes, covering various technologies, like CSS, HTML5, WordPress, Javascript and many more.

WordPress Help Sheet Wallpaper

WordPress Help Sheet Wallpaper
The WordPress Help Sheet Wallpaper is a simple desktop wallpaper listing Basic Template Files, PHP Snippets for the Header, PHP Snippets for the Templates, Extra Stuff for WordPress, based on the WPCandy WordPress Help Sheet.
Download: 2560x1600px.

Drupal Cheat Sheet Desktop Wallpaper

Drupal Cheat Sheet Desktop Wallpaper
The Drupal Cheat Sheet Desktop Wallpaper is a desktop wallpaper that features the most popular variables of the open source content management system Drupal.
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x800px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.

HTML5 Canvas Cheat Sheet

HTML5 Canvas Cheat Sheet
The information on this wallpaper is pretty much just a copy of what is found in the WHATWG specs, just condensed and a little bit easier to read. There are virtually no explanations, and no examples other than some graphics for compositing values. It's basically just a listing of the attributes and methods of the canvas element and the 2d drawing context.
Download: 1388x1027px.

CSS Cheat Sheet Wallpaper in Helvetica

CSS Cheat Sheet Wallpaper in Helvetica
This is the very popular CSS cheat sheet in Helvetica from styl.eti.me. Simplistic in appearance, but very useful for quick referencing. Unfortunately we can not find a working download link for this cool wallpaper, but the good news is they do have a PSD version available. So download it and resize.
Download: CSS Cheat Sheet Wallpaper in Helvetica.

TextMate Shortcuts Wallpaper

TextMate Shortcuts Wallpaper
Here is a TextMate wallpaper that will guide you through some of its powerful features and help you get a handle on all of the keyboard shortcuts. The PSD file is also available.
Download: 1280x800px – 1920x1200px.

Yahoo! UI (YUI) Cheat Sheets as Wallpaper

Yahoo! UI (YUI) Cheat Sheets as Wallpaper
Yahoo! provides a number of cheat sheets for their YUI library widgets however these are all in PDF format and not usable as wallpaper. However, here you will find all of those cheatsheets converted to PNG images of various sizes all for your desktop.
There are wallpapers available for Animation, Calendar, Connection Manager, Dom Collection, Drag & Drop Event, Utility & Custom Event Logger, Slider and TreeView. And all are available in the following desktop sizes: 1400x1050px, 1280x960px, 1165x900px and 1024x768px.
Download: Yahoo! UI (YUI) Cheat Sheets as Wallpaper.

jQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet Wallpaper

jQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet Wallpaper
Download: 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.

Prototype Dissected Wallpaper

Prototype Dissected Wallpaper
If you need a little help in getting to know Prototype a little better and some help in understanding how the code works, then this is the wallpaper for you. You have a choice of either a dark or white wallpaper, and are available in these sizes: 1280x960px and 1440x900px.
Download: 1280x960px (Dark) – 1440x900px (Dark) – 1280x960px (White) – 1440x900px (White).

Git Cheat Sheet Wallpaper

Git Cheat Sheet Wallpaper
Download: 1100x850px – 3300x2550px.

A Themer's Cheatsheet Wallpaper

A Themer's Cheatsheet Wallpaper
A Themer's Cheatsheet Wallpaper is a quick refresher of web design fundamentals directly on your desktop. It is available for download in several different colors and the original SVG has been released to the Public Domain.
Download: 1280x800px (Blue) – 1280x800px (Red) – 1280x800px (Black) – 1280x800px (Green).

Font Anatomy Wallpaper

Font Anatomy Wallpaper
Download: 1920x1200px.

SEO Wallpapers

SEO Wallpapers
Think of it as a desk reference checklist that is always at your fingertips. From pre-campaign to reporting, the basics (and more) are right here for you to put directly on your desktop.
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x960px – 1280x1024px – 1440x900px.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Periodic Table of Typefaces
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x800px – 1280x1024px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.

Color Theory Quick Reference Poster

Color Theory Quick Reference Poster
The Color Theory Quick Reference Poster for Designers has all of the basics of color theory contained in one place – specifically, a cool infographic-esque poster. This way, you can quickly reference things that may have slipped to the back of your mind since design school.
Download: 1280x800px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.

Web Designer Wallpaper

Web Designer Wallpaper
Download: 1280x1024px (White) – 1280x1024px (Dark) – 1680x10050px (Dark) – 1280x1024px (White).

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