This should have been a relatively straight forward one, but the desktop publishing age messed our terminology quite a bit it seems.

A typeface is a stylized alphabet (in full or part) usually containing punctuation, multi-lingual and accented letters, symbols and ligatures packaged up under a specific name. This name is derived by the creator but usually is descriptive of the style and the variation or weight.

During my education it was made clear to me that a font is a collection or family of typefaces under one name and style. These variations usually taking the form of ‘weights’. For example, the font Univers being made up of many weights to make up, what I was taught was, the family or font. These range from thin, light, medium, demi, bold and black which increase in the thickness or boldness of the lines. Each one of these weights is a typeface with a name like ‘Univers – Light’.

Later in my career (only a year or so ago) this was bested and I learned from more knowledgeable sources that, in fact, each of these variations is definitely a typeface in it’s own right. Every cut or weight of a typeface is known as a typeface and a related collection of typefaces with a common style is known as a typeface-family.

While there is still healthy debate, it would be fair to call a font in the instance of the present day a digital representation of a typeface, a means of reproducing the letters in its style. However, historically a font was a complete set of lead cut characters of a typeface in a specific weight and size. An example being Garamond – Italic 12pt.

The example above shows some typefaces from the Universe family. Incidentally, the phrase ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ used is called a ‘pangram’ which is a phrase that uses every letter of the alphabet. And while we’re at it, the name alphabet is ultimately derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet; Alpha and Beta.