Help with identifying this font?

March 6, 2018 4:40 AM

Font inside.

Hi,

Does anyone know the name of the font Google has used today for its Gabriel García Márquez doodle [here]?

posted by ihaveyourfoot to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Best answer: The doodle was designed by Matthew Cruickshank. You could contact him on his website for a definitive answer.
posted by bcwinters at 5:11 AM on March 6, 2018

Dieter Steffmann has a version of this font called Titania.
posted by zadcat at 5:26 AM on March 6, 2018

Titania
posted by zadcat at 5:42 AM on March 6, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks. I emailed the guy. He didn't reply.

I will use Titania which looks to be the next best thing.
posted by ihaveyourfoot at 9:20 AM on March 6, 2018

You misunderstand. Titania is the font, it's not the "next best thing" – but Steffmann's been reviving old Victorian letterforms and he sometimes renames them. So this font may be available under other names, but it's definitely the same font, not an approximation.
posted by zadcat at 12:29 PM on March 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: No I did not misunderstand. Titania is not the font. I contacted Matthew Cruickshank, as advised above, and he told me he created the font himself in Illustrator. Titania is like it.

Thanks bcwinters!
posted by ihaveyourfoot at 1:11 AM on March 7, 2018

No I did not misunderstand. Titania is not the font. I contacted Matthew Cruickshank, as advised above, and he told me he created the font himself in Illustrator. Titania is like it.

As a typographer who has been working with digital fonts professionally since the 1980s, i find that account to be unlikely – perhaps there was some sort of miscommunication.

I increased the preview size on zadcat’s link for the font up to “large” for better detail and to my very-experienced eye it looks like the source of both images are the exact same vectors. Even the letterspacing appears to be the same, which isn’t a given when people use characters that they then manipulate in Illustrator for logo work, etc.

Redrawing characters from scratch and making them appear so much of an exact match to a font would be a huge waste of time, less so if i was tracing a high-resolution bitmap rendering of the original font, but even that would be an odd thing to do instead of just using the existing font.
posted by D.C. at 2:34 AM on March 7, 2018

Response by poster: I hear you but those were his exact words, word for word. There was no miscommunication. I guess he prodded around with it. It doesn't look the same to my eye but you're the professional...
posted by ihaveyourfoot at 3:55 AM on March 7, 2018

FWIW, this is a (very) quick and dirty overlay of the preview from Dafont on top of the Google image, offset by a few pixels:

https://i.imgur.com/5ZLBGNC.png
posted by Enemy of Joy at 7:00 AM on March 7, 2018