Fiona O'Leary, Design Products MA student at Royal College of Art, created this gadget for her graduation project, so this is not the type of thing you can buy in stores (yet). 

She says: "Designing for print on screen is tricky and always requires clarity. There is very little sense of the scale of typography, and colours often look different. This results in multiple printouts to test the different font sizes and colours. Spector is a tool that helps bridge the gap of designing on digital screen for finalised print. It is a hand-held device allowing various print materials to become interactive. If designing for print on screen, it is best to start with print.

Spector software works as a Indesign plugin with a live feed of the camera. The hardware connects to the computer via bluetooth. The user presses the button on the device and takes a picture of the font with a macro camera and matches this picture to a font data base and changes live text in InDesign to that exact font, size, leading and kerning."

Spector has a camera inside - once you press the capture button, it takes a picture of a font. Additionally, it also captures real-life colors, giving you their CMYK and RGB color breakdowns. In its current prototype stage, it can recognize seven typefaces, including Apercu, Bureau Grot, Canela, and Founders Grotesk. The font, in all its true glory, then 'magiacally' appears on your computer screen, as it connects directly to InDesign. O'Leary, as expected, wishes to connect it with a larger font database. The device can also store both fonts and colors, so you could even use it while on the go.

We love this idea and while it make raise some anti-piracy issues in the future (licenses would still be required to actually use the fonts and colors Spector recognizes), we sure hope this prototype sooner or later becomes available commercially as well.

Spector from Fiona O'Leary on Vimeo.