I assumed I could find my answer via google, etc but no luck. Does anyone know a resource that would list what fonts are used on various US coins? Thanks in advance.
I believe the front of the lincoln cent uses Franklin Gothic Medium for "IN GOD WE TRUST" and "LIBERTY". I tried it in photoshop and it's very close. Only had time to try that one. Best way to match up fonts is to take a high resolution photo of a coin as a reference and get on a site like myfonts.com and start visually matching the intricacies (stems, serifs, bars, bases) of the font used and narrow it down. That website lets you type in a sample text near the top of the page an it will give you a preview of each font on that page using that phrase.
Great info , thanks! I'll be interested to try myfonts.com "WhatTheFont" section to see what it returns...
Yeah the What The Font upload option is awesome. I didn't mention it because I didn't know if you had access to something like photoshop. That upload option on What The Font can be picky and I've found it best to crop, isolate (cut out), and sometimes rotate to 90 degrees, the text from the image you want to match and convert it to black text on white background before uploading. It seems to have better success that way. I have to match fonts alot for clients at work that do not have vector versions of their logos and don't know the font used.
I haven't a clear answer for this but I'd suspect we could reasonably consider that while fonts on coins and currency may seem similar to known font families like Franklin Gothic, Copperplate and the classic Roman type sets, amongst others, that taking into account issues of counterfeiting, coin dies and plates designed for notes, are most likely are not true font sets. Rather, they are variations of classic, easy to read and familiar type styles. Therefore each is unique to a series of coin designs, so that the 'devices' appear similar on any given year's issued coins and so they are not easily reproduced by would be counterfeiters. If a counterfeiter could help themselves by use of established cut fonts that are easily referenced and obtained then a lot of difficult work counterfeiting the devices on a coin and/or avoiding tricky accurate engraving of type and numerals on currency designs would be that much easier. This is especially the case of modern notes given the use of powerful graphics editing software to fake currency designs. Apart from that, some other coin and font related stuff you all might find interesting or useful: Identifont is a good tool if you are interested in exploring or matching a fonts. Numus Moneta is an interesting font developed from Ancients. The US Mint had a press lease in 2008 announcing plans for the first coin with readable braille. Follow the link to a link in the press release to an image of the coin. I think something similarly was being worked on for US paper currency but I don't have a source for that. Not sure about world coins, if they offer braille or not.
