Font Name Generator

How the Font Name Generator works

Font name generator: choosing a name that fits

A font name is read in a menu next to a hundred others and typed by designers who need to tell a foundry which family they mean, so the conventions are short, mostly one or two words, and they have shifted in clear generations, which is why the Convention select is the main control and the Class select changes the class words and the nouns inside it. The Latinate coinage, Helvetica in the famous case, Univers, Futura, Optima, Frutiger, is the twentieth-century convention, a made-up word with a Latin or a classical ending that reads as neutral and international, and it is the register of the great sans families. The designer-plus-class form, Gill Sans in the famous case, Johnston Sans, Bodoni, Baskerville, Caslon, is the oldest convention, the surname of the punchcutter or the designer and, since the sans, the class of the face. The single English noun, Archer, Whitney, Freight, Chronicle, Inter, Karla, is the American foundry convention of the last twenty years, one ordinary word, often a place or an object, chosen for how it looks set in the face itself. The name-plus-optical-size form, Freight Text, Playfair Display, Chronicle Headline, Whitney Caption, is the professional convention for a family cut in sizes, the name and the size it is drawn for, and a superfamily has four or five of them. The foundry-prefix form, GT Walsheim, FF Meta, ITC Garamond, ABC Diatype, is the licensing convention, the foundry's initials in front of the name so the family cannot be confused with another foundry's version. The place-plus-class form, Söhne, Sectra, Walsheim, Brixton Grotesk, is the Swiss and the London independent convention, a place the foundry has a connection to and the class. And the revival, Neue Haas Grotesk in the famous case, Proxima Nova, Avenir Next, Garamond Pro, is the redrawing convention, an old name and a word meaning new, Neue, Nova, Next, Now, Neo or Pro, that tells the buyer this is the cleaned-up digital cut.

The words are surnames, places, Latin fragments and ordinary English, so a result is a new combination rather than a real typeface by design, though font names are trademarked and the famous ones are defended aggressively, the surnames of the classic punchcutters are shared across a dozen versions each, and the single-noun convention is crowded, so search a name on the major type retailers before releasing a real family and treat a coincidence as likely. A font name also has to be typed in a CSS file and read in a menu, so the shapes here are one to three words.

For the foundry that releases it, the Business section; for the design studio that sets a brief in it, the Agency name page in the Business section; for the app or the website it is set on, the Software section; for the album cover or the book jacket it is set on, the Album name and Book title pages; and for the colour it is printed in, the Colour name and Paint colour name pages.

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