Carry on as before and very few people will notice. That’s great to know Piccia, thanks, but – why should I care?Īs said above – in a way if you don’t care it’s just fine. ![]() The TLDR version: a bastardisation of the Old French word to indicate a piece of movable type made from melted lead. If you are into useless etymology (I know I am), you will be pleased to read this article explaining the origins of the term ‘font’. “Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicisation, ornamentation, and designer or foundry.” Here’s a definition of font (from Wikipedia): This is because each individual character had to be fused and then typeset. In fact, in the old times every single size of type and every single character, let’s say Freight Sans Pro Black body size 160 letter Z, was 1 font. All together they form the font family (or typeface). Each variation – Light, Book, Medium, etc, with all their Italic versions, is a font. That’s what a font is: FreightBigProItalic is one of the 72 fonts within the FreightBig family. With a font family like Freight, you don’t really need any other typeface to create hierarchy as well as visual interest. This, by the way, makes me like Freight a lot: I know that I will be spoilt for choice of weights and styles if I choose Freight for my projects. Then if you look closer, you can see that each of these font families (or typefaces) contains a number of fonts. Under the name ‘Freight’ you can find Freight Sans, Freight Big, Fright Neo, Freight Text. And you can even have more than one family within the same family, sharing the same surname.Įxample: ‘Freight’ is the denomination for a number of different font families, or typefaces. Just like real families, typefaces have different characters inside it. You can also say that a typeface is a family of fonts. ![]() What’s in a typefaceĪ typeface is a collection of characters sharing the same design features. Having said all this, I still think that if you are keen to understand how to create a great experience with the typography of the products you design, it can be very useful to understand the difference between font and typeface. ![]() Mind you, I do know a few type-obsessed designers who might not make their annoyance public – but they’re definitely seething internally when they hear the terms used incorrectly.įor us mere mortals, the distinction simply isn’t as important as it used to be when there was a real reason for it. I read a Fast Company article on the subject: they interviewed various famous designers, who all seemed to agree that you’d have to be a bit of a type nerd in order to get annoyed. I wouldn’t correct you if I noticed that you said ‘font’ where you should have said ‘typeface’. The truth is that from a certain point of view it doesn’t matter at all. In fact, I often I catch myself using the term ‘font’ when ‘typeface’ would be the correct one.īut does it matter in the end? Or is it just a boring punctualisation by type pedants lording it over the ignorant masses? ![]() And you probably never gave it another thought. In fact, I’m sure that you’ve heard the terms ‘font’ and ‘typeface’ used interchangeably. You may not even be aware of the fact that there is indeed a difference between font and typeface.
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