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Student Makes 'Shazam For Fonts', a Gadget That Detects Fonts and Captures Colors (theverge.com)
Imagine being able to use a miniature device which could quickly tell you the kind of font you're looking at in a book, and also tell you about its color. Fiona O'Leary, a student at the Royal College of Art, has developed exactly that kind of device, and she is calling it Spector. The device, which is in its prototype phase, also saves the font type information and loads the data on Adobe InDesign. The Verge reports: If she loved the font London uses on its subway maps, for instance, she could use this device to capture that font and load it into Adobe InDesign. Spector takes a photo of the font and uses an algorithm to translate that image into information about the shape of letters and symbols. It then cross-references that information with a font database to correctly identify it. The Spector also captures colors and breaks them down into CMYK/RGB values.
WhatTheFont can look at font text and tell you what it is.
Taking an existing color and converting it to RGB or CMYK is what any hardware store that will color-match paint to a sample has been doing for years.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What The Font
So she uploads a photo to WhatTheFont using the api they provide for doing just that, and then pulls the RGB values from the not-in-anyway-colour-calibrated image and converts them to CMYK.
Fucking groundbreaking.
Fiona means parents care enough about being respectable in Ireland to give her an Irish name, but are not secure enough to give here the more upper class (and abroad unpronounceable) "Saoirse". "O'Leary" means that the family have not yet married into a high enough status clan to afford a double barrelled, post independence gaelcised name like "McDonagh-Ã" FaolÃin".
This necessitated sending the child abroad for better qualifications, though clearly enough money and influence has been gained in the meantime to afford a promotional media story, which points to a guilded future on return to Dublin, likely running a studio with several lucrative multi-million euro projects designing fonts and logos for Government Quangos and occasionally appearing at race meetings.
IMHO
If the company is using a custom font for their logotype, it's not going to be in the database this uses (and even if it was, you're not going to be able to find the font unless the company provides it to you, or someone leaked it, in which case using it is already copyright violation, but knowing its name isn't).
If the company is using a publicly available font for their logotype, they have no grounds for complaint if someone else uses the same font. I can't start "Pfhorrest Comics" with a logotype of just those words in Comic Sans and then sue you for making your "Magarity Comics" logo also use Comic Sans.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
This doesn't seem possible to do accurately through a cellphone camera without some other lighting and/or color reference being present.
You mean, like, oh, maybe a built-in flash that exists on every smartphone camera?
It shouldn't. It's pretty trivial. You could do it yourself by taking a picture then using that eyedropper tool on it.
You might not get the results you expect though. The color the camera sees will depend a lot on the illumination color. And your eyes don't faithfully report the actual color of things.