Fiona O’Leary’s clever Spector device is an eyedropper tool for fonts and colours in real life

Posted in Design
By Sam Bathe on 20 Jul 2016

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While on the web you can ‘inspect element’ to identify a font or colour, it’s never been quite that easy in real life. So for her graduation project at the Royal College of Art, Fiona O’Leary designed a unique tool that lets you eyedrop a magazine, book or pretty much anything in real life. Called Spector, the device will relay information back to your computer and detail the font, size, kerning and colours. Connecting via a plugin for InDesign, essentially Spector is a Bluetooth camera with some complicated software doing the legwork to analyse the image, plus if you’re out and about when you take a shapshot, Spector will cache up to 20 samples until you’re back at your machine. Currently Spector is just a prototype – a working prototype at that – but with its sleek design and an audience clamouring for this sort of technology, hopefully Fiona is able to turn it into a commercial product.

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