Can you identify fonts
and pantone colours?
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We all have our favourite fonts and then there are those that we don’t like no matter how wonderful other people think they are. The same is true of colours that may be commonly used in branding, or marketing collateral. But did you know that if you come across a great online font and what to know what it is, or need to quickly identify specific website pantone colours, in case you want to replicate them, there is a way?
To illustrate this, we wanted to share a recent experience. One of our clients approached us, they wanted our help to identify pantone colours that would match the colours currently used by one of their clients. In addition, they wanted to find out what their font was on their website. They expected us to make a charge for it, in fact they insisted we did. But we chose not to.
As one of Pixooma’s Principles is to be transparent, we decided that it would be collaborative and useful if we used a show and tell approach.
Show and tell
As one of Pixooma’s Principles is to be transparent, we decided that it would be collaborative and useful if we used a show and tell approach. That way if the situation happened again, they would be able to do it themselves. It took 15 minutes in total, and they were very appreciative of our efforts and generosity.
In a similar vein, we wanted to share this with others. It’s amazing how good it feels to help others with something they are struggling with, when you can give them the benefit of your experience quickly and clearly. So, here goes.
Essentially, you will need to use two different apps:
Let’s deal with them in order.
Sip
Sip simply picks the Hexadecimal (colour) up from the screen, then you need to use a colour conversion website to convert the colour values from Hex to Pantone colours, which as you know are essential in the design and printing industry.
The results show you near matches, complete with their pantone numbers and samples, in as short a colour distance as possible. You can set the colour distance (scale of 16 to 96), the lower the number, the more accurate your results.
Whilst Sip is for Mac’s, there are other free apps and websites that do the same thing for windows based operating systems. However, a brief Google search brought this up. Type in Ctrl + Shift + C on your keyboard. This shows you all the details of a particular element on a website when you hover your mouse cursor on the elements. You can find the colour code, font size and type.
WhatFont
If Ctrl + Shift + C is not detailed enough for you to confirm the font type, then install a Chrome Extensions called WhatFont. After you have downloaded the extension, you just open the page from which you need to identify the font. Then click the extension icon in your browser, however your mouse over the text (including menus, buttons etc.) and a window will appear with all the relevant information including font type, size, colour and family.
If you like these tools and apps we can send future ones straight to your inbox…