If you use a web font, check the foundry or service’s licensing conditions. Web fonts are usually in WOFF or WOFF2 format. Or you can use a web font - one hosted on the web, either on your site or a third-party hosting service like Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts. You can work with web safe fonts installed by default on most devices, like Arial, Georgia, Impact, and Times New Roman. You might download a beautiful display font to your device, but if your users haven’t downloaded the same font, it won’t show up for them. If you’re a web designer, downloaded font files aren’t all that useful. If you download a font and store it locally, it’s usually an OTF or a TTF file. In computing, a font is a file that holds the data required to represent the typeface on a screen or in desktop publishing. Manual typesetting also gave us the words “uppercase” and “lowercase”: Typesetters kept the uppercase and lowercase letters in separate wooden cases, usually storing the capital letters in the upper case, or the one above the case containing regular letters. The word “font” is based on the French word “ fonte,” meaning “casting,” because type founders cast each set of letters from melted metal. And they had to do a similar swap when changing from regular to bold or italic. Instead, they had to swap out one set of letters for another larger or smaller than the original. Typesetters couldn’t scale up the size of letters with the click of a button as we can today. To understand this terminology, it helps to think back to manual typesetting. Because of their historical association with books, serif typefaces communicate trustworthiness, authority, and formality.ĭifferent fonts in the Congenial typeface. Serifs aim to increase legibility, especially in print and at smaller sizes, though it’s unclear whether they make a significant difference in practice. The first typefaces designed for the printing press had serifs, or small decorative lines or strokes, added to the ends of characters. With a decorative purpose in mind, she also created alternate glyphs with extra curls for characters that fall at the start and end of the segment. To mimic handwriting, Emily created letters with different widths that float around the baseline. In contrast, the Sophia typeface, designed by Emily Spadoni, is meant for headings rather than body text, so legibility wasn’t a top priority. Now, Courier is the industry standard for screenplays: One page of a script in 12-point, 10-pitch Courier equates to about a minute of screen time, a benchmark that helps film directors create an estimated shooting schedule and budget. After typewriters fell into disuse, monospaced typefaces became popular with programmers who wanted characters to align perfectly. The Courier typeface ultimately served other goals, too. To make the typed text line up nicely, Howard “Bud” Kettler, the designer of Courier, made it monospaced - every character has the same width. The Courier typeface dates back to the mid-1950s when manual typewriters were standard in every office. When designing a typeface for headings, they focus more on conveying a particular feeling or impression than optimizing readability because headings add visual interest and capture attention. The Garamond typeface, for example, has italic, bold, and semibold versions.Įach typeface has a unifying concept or design goal - designers who create a typeface for body text aim to maximize legibility. It’s an umbrella term that includes all the different typeface varieties. What is a typeface?Ī typeface is a collection of characters that share distinctive design features, such as specific patterns in their shape, width, spacing, height, angles, or serifs. Web designers straddle the worlds of graphic design and computing, so understanding how professionals from both worlds understand the difference between a typeface and a font opens the door to more effective website design and development. To untangle the meanings of “font” and “typeface,” we must closely examine how professionals in relevant fields use them. Arial, Helvetica, Courier New: Are they fonts or typefaces? If you ask a typographer and a developer this question, they’ll most likely give you different answers.
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