Lirics

I will start this SING SHOP TRICKS series of posts from pretty simple for professional designers and horror for customers designing task. 

You have the logo and you have to rebuild it or simply find the font used on this logo to make the rest of the wording in your design match the “company font style”.

This situation is the most common in Sign Shop day work. Every 9 of 10 customers have a nice look attractive awesome logo in worst for production file format – bitmap picture. No matter who did this log and how customers get it. Your job description is clear – you have to rebuild it in vector format to make it works for production.

The first step is to find the font used in the logo. The steps with how to easy rebuild the logo symbols I will describe in next posts.

I saw a lot of urgent need help in design forums and FB groups. So this post came from a social request.

The way

The Easy way to find the font is using specialized websites. And better to use at least two of them to compare the results. Nowadays so many fonts are duplicate each other with very small changes however in the logo exactly these differences make sense for customers. 

By the way, the Adobe PhotoShop now has the same feature in the new interface, but it’s not a topic of this post.

The use of these font-search websites is pretty easy they all have an intuitive interface. First step you upload your bitmap sample of font, next depend on the website you can improve the contrast and saturation of your bitmap for better readability of text with the searched font. Next, you probably need to name each letter in the text you select. After pressing the “Search” button the web search engine will do the dirty work for you. In the search result list, you will find a lot of paid and free for personal use fonts that look like or same you looking for. 

The list of exact web search engine you can easy find by words from title of this post “What The Font?”. 

Easy? Not so much as looks like.

The Shortcut

These font searching websites are made for sale. And almost all of the fonts they found are prices way higher than you charge for your logo rebuild job. In the perfect world the customer will pay all these spendings however not all of our customers can do this because of many reasons.

The rest of the post will be the description of the exact trick you can use. 

Here are the steps. On the website search results page, you can see the searched text by exact font style you need.

1. Zoom the Internet Browser window to 200% (or more depending on the size of the text).

2. Make a screenshot by press the “PrnSc” key on PC or Shift+Cmd+3 in MacOS. This operation will keep the screenshot in the clipboard.

3. Open any vector graphic software like Corel Draw or Illustrator.

4. Paste the clipboard screenshot image into your project file.

5. Cut the exact area with searched text 

6. Use the trace feature to transform into the vector.

7. Check the accuracy of tracing by reducing the anchor points!

Now you have a pretty nice vector with the exact font style ready for production.

Thank you for reading!

Yeahgor.