Startup Idea: Font Identification Software for Graphic Designers

Startup idea to develop a more advanced font identification software that can analyze various image types and match them to any font available online or in the user's system. The proposed software should also offer options to filter search based on font characteristics without requiring exhaustive manual tagging.

I am a graphic artist and every day I spend probably 25 percent of my time just trying to identify fonts. There are some resources online to help, such as WhatFontIs.com and Identifont.com, but I feel that there could be software that could do the job better, with more features.

Right now, Adobe has something called TypeKit, which is so close to being useful it's more frustrating than anything. It helps you choose or identify fonts based on categories like, whether or not the font you are looking for is a Script Font, Serif Font, Sans Serif Font, Bold, Italic, etc. It works and the interface is great looking, but only works with Typekit fonts, which only account for like 1 percent of all fonts available.

The software I think would be most useful would analyze a JPEG, PNG, TIFF, TARGA or other image file and match it to existing fonts anywhere it could find them, online, on your system, etc. It would also allow you to choose characteristics of the font you are looking for, such as serif, sans serif, script, italic, etc. I think some software like this might exist, but you have to spend a lot of time tagging all of your fonts. I would hope a new software model would use metadata from the fonts you download or the titles or fonts installed on your system to achieve this instead.