This article applies to anyone who has been given the daunting task of finding a specific font.

The old way, you’d bust out a massive font book and start flipping pages based on some simple schema (serif vs. sans). Maybe you were a little more internet-savvy so you’d high-tail it to dafont.com or fontfile.com and browse a huge catalog online with a slightly better taxonomy (Fancy, Old School, Script, Destorted, etc.).

Until now…

Thankfully the powers that be, at MyFonts.com, engineered the incredible and incredibly useful “What The Font!”

No more time wasted browsing countless pages of font families with no end in sight. Now it’s as simple as taking a screenshot and uploading the image to put a name to the typeface. MyFonts provides some key points to using their font identifier effectively. Namely, ensuring contrast between the type and background (figure/ground), trying to maintain space between the characters (a lowercase “L” and a lowercase “O” sure looks like a lowercase “B” to me), and keeping the text as horizontal as possible.

And, if by some fluke, you aren’t able to identify your fonts using What The Font, they have a great community to discuss font-finding techniques and get font ID feedback from the typographically-sensitive masses.