Please Identify a Font

October 19, 2008 12:39 PM

Could you please identify this font? I've already tried the online font identification doohickeys. Thanks!
posted by sciurus to media & arts (10 comments total)

It looks like a customized, sort of linocut version of Palatino (or Book Antiqua) Bold Italic.
posted by tepidmonkey at 1:16 PM on October 19, 2008

Look at the t in the logo and the t in the name - they are not identical. I'd guess that it was hand drawn, not a font.
posted by rhapsodie at 1:17 PM on October 19, 2008

Hmm... it reminds me of a more chiseled-out version of Mercurius Script, but that's not exactly it either.
posted by sixtyten at 1:44 PM on October 19, 2008

It looks like maybe they ran a standard font through Flash's "Optimize Curves" tool at high settings...
posted by scose at 3:09 PM on October 19, 2008

I agree with everyone else in that it's an altered version of a font. It looks to me like someone ran a very low-resolution logo through a vector trace program like those found in Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. I found a similarly-shaped font, Minion Pro, and ran it through Corel Trace to see if I could get a similar effect. There's no way to know for sure if this is what was done, what tracing program they used or what settings they traced at. My results weren't too far off, though.
posted by bristolcat at 4:24 PM on October 19, 2008

Wow, that's pretty cool, bristolcat.
posted by sciurus at 6:15 PM on October 19, 2008

Inkscape has a surprisingly solid Trace Bitmap feature.
posted by tremspeed at 8:51 PM on October 19, 2008

I came back and looked at this a little closer this morning. I assumed last night that what I was looking at was a very poorly traced logo, probably done by some production artist somewhere that was given a very, very low resolution JPG to copy from. But I was wrong. That's the actual logo and there's even a vector copy on that website. They could have run it through a trace program, but it's more likely that it was a hand-manipulated font.

If you want to achieve a similar effect without hand-manipulating every letter, like I did above, take a JPG of your desired word in your desired font and reduce the resolution significantly. I mean, you want to see pixels and all kinds of stuff being messed up. Then you can run it through a trace program and see what you get. I have never used Inkscape's trace before, but it probably is the most accessible to you. Hopefully the trace program has lots of options that you can manipulate and play with to get a similar look. You'll want a purposefully bad trace, so that will usually involve reducing quality, number of nodes and complexity.
posted by bristolcat at 8:28 AM on October 20, 2008

This was probably not done with any bitmap tracing. In Adobe Illustrator, the process would be:
(1) Type your text with the desired base font using the type tool.
(2) With the new object selected with the select tool (not the type tool), do Type menu > Create Outlines.
(3) Keeping the new vector objects selected, do Filter menu > Distort > Roughen... (a dialog box will appear, giving controls for the filter).

Whoever did the logo most likely cleaned up a few points manually to finish.
posted by D.C. at 9:48 AM on October 20, 2008

All of the serifs are different. Maybe they are hand cut.
posted by debbie_ann at 5:37 AM on November 19, 2008