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Comment by dalore | Hacker News Reader

Is there a website/app/service that will ask you what features you want of a font and it will show you recommendations?

I haven't seen one, but it could be a fairly nice weekend project. Use a couple of hacks[1] to get the fonts, compare that with a list of font uses, and ask the user:

What's the emotion to be conveyed? Where's it used? (Heading, wherever)

Then, display the top font, and a visual list of choices. I suppose that one could also link to free OSS fonts as well, but that would likely have to be second-tier compared to using what's on the computer already.

1. http://www.lalit.org/lab/javascript-css-font-detect

I would love to do this as a weekend project, although I don't have the first clue as to what fonts should be recommended based on what uses are intended. Anyone interested in collaborating? I'll do the backend and you develop the questions and font recommendations.

PM'd you. I do front-end as well.

Identifont is a "20 Questions" quiz to identify a given font, but I've used it to discover fonts for a given purpose.

http://www.identifont.com/identify.html

Well, there's an awesome flowchart:

"So You Need a Typeface": http://julianhansen.com/index.php?/alternative-type-finder/

The path to Comic Sans is appropriately humorous.

Damn, that flowchart is pretty much the posterchild of how not to make a flowchart. Unnecessarily overlapping elements everywhere. It's damn near impossible to follow and I'm supposed to trust their design knowledge?

It's also just unhelpful. It's not even clear what many of the questions are getting at. Furthermore, look how many of the branches have a leaf on one side and a huge subtree on the other. Unless he expects the leaves are going to be chosen that much more than the big subtrees, he's nowhere close to getting as much information out of each question as he can.

http://typekit.com/libraries/full?languages=english&styl...

something like that?

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