What’s My Font?

Boy wish I knew what that font was? It’s tough to replicate when you can’t even name it.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know that during my period of “expanded sofa time” I offered to produce an organization’s website for free. I’m in the midst of doing that now for the Beacon Falls Congregational Church. So far they’re happy.

Don’t look yet. Their old site it still there!

The church has certain iconic elements in use that will also be on the website. There’s a beautiful fan design and the distinctive font used on the sign you see above.

Boy I wish I knew what that font was? It’s tough to replicate when you can’t even name it.

OK–I won’t tease. I now know the font is University Roman Normal. Finding out what it was was half the fun!

I headed to Identifont and began to answer a series of questions about my font. Did it have serifs? What did the “q” look like? Since the church’s logo only has three upper case letters and about a dozen lower case most of the questions were answered “not sure.”

What started as 7,644 possible fonts was quickly whittled and whittled and whittled again. Identifont threw up its hands with only 30 possible matches left. It took a few seconds more to find my match.

I’ll use this font for the logo by converting it to an image. It won’t appear elsewhere. Designing for the Internet has lots of restrictions. Webpages only display fonts already installed on your computer&#185! It’s doubtful you’ve got this one.

&#185 – This restriction will soon be lifted, but for compatibility sake not yet.

8 thoughts on “What’s My Font?”

  1. Glad you were able you find the font, Geoff. Good luck finishing the design. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

  2. I had a friend who thought the computer was insulting him when the bubble popped up with “Font Face”.

  3. Cufon’s alright, but you can’t highlight text, which in my mind is a crazy limitation when there are better solutions out there; you also have to update it from time to time (this was required when IE 9 came out, for instance).

    For a few bucks a month, you can look at TypeKit or fonts.com webfonts; in this case, the latter does have University Roman as part of its catalog. Both are updated automatically as necessary, as they’re hosted solutions; with proper CSS file construction, you can fallback on websafe fonts if the services were to ever go down.

    They’re both nifty and are pretty compatible nowadays.

  4. Just a consideration to keep in mind: Making sites too fancy only serves to make them either very difficult or impossible for people who are visually impaired to access or use them. My best friend is legally blind, and uses the Internet a LOT. He accesses it with Braille-display and/or text-to-speech software. He has great difficulty navigating sites that embed everything into SCRIPTS or FLASH, or that use graphical menus and/or links. Even Mobile devices have difficulty with some of the more graphically-intense or FLASH and SCRIPTED sites.

    1. using the “alt” and “title” attributes to mark-up makes graphics accessible for visually impaired who use reader programs, but unfortunately, many coders are unaware or too lazy to do that.

  5. Geoff, you noted that you were designing the site, accounting for Font compatability issues. I might suggest that you verify the new site your are constructioning on at least IE 9. Some of your recent posts, ala “A Visit To Headquarters (Where The Nerdy Kids Play)” do not display the imbedded demonstration items in IE 9 (Win 7). Without researching more of your prior posts, there have been other examples of “missing blog items” in IE 9, that I verifyed were present when using Mozilla and Chrome.

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