Why Dr. Seuss Liked Drawing Dirty Pictures

Even if you’re a designer, you may not be able to identify all the typefaces you see in the world by sight, aside from a few of the most common, like Helvetica or Futura (or, sadly, Comic Sans). Luckily, Fonts in Use will find it for you, as DesignTAXI alerts us.

The online archive, created in 2010 by a trio of font and typography experts, documents the different typefaces that you can see in the wild, whether it’s on Sriracha bottles, in magazines, or on a film poster. Searchable by industry, format, and specific typeface, each entry in the archive details every one of the typefaces used in a particular image. Once you find a particular typeface used in, say, the movie poster for Moonrise Kingdom, then you can click through to the tags to find where else you can see Tilda out in the world. (Answer: a website for a design studio called Pixiegate.)

The site can identify the use of Engravers Old English on the cover of Taylor Swift's album Reputation, Albertus in the opening titles of John Carpenter’s films, and Candice in the Cheers logo. The archive features current typeface examples both familiar and obscure—there are a high number of European products and titles that might be unfamiliar to American audiences—as well as vintage ones.

For a design obsessive, the site and its accompanying blog is a little slice of heaven. For the uninitiated, it provides an unexpected appreciation of type, a reminder that someone out there had to choose the seven-plus typefaces that come together to make a Sriracha bottle. It will give you a whole new way to look at the text you see everywhere, every day.

Explore for yourself here.

[h/t DesignTAXI]

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