The crazy world of Typography
Fonts VS Typefaces
It is well known that when Steve Jobs left university to found Apple, the one course he kept going back to was calligraphy, taught by calligraphist, and former monk, Robert Palladino. As Steve once said, it was there that he learned “what makes great typography great”, but, what makes great typography great? Hold on, let’s take even a step back, what even is typography?
Encoded information camouflaged in the form of fonts, that is what typography is in essence. A way to communicate in an almost imperceptible way.
A piece of text doesn’t just share a message through letters, but also through the way those letters have been designed, arranged, presented and coloured. Whenever you read text you are not only absorbing the words by themselves, your brain is also perceiving another message conveyed by all the typography choices, whether they have been made consciously or subconsciously, but the point is that words do not and cannot exists without a typeface, they go hand in hand. Typography decisions set the mood, the tone, the emotional relevance of the message, the importance of the text, the transcendence and its credibility. Take for example this IBM logo, would you trust a tech company that presented themselves like this? The text remains unchanged, but the user’s reaction and perception of the brand gets drastically altered.
“Yeah, very nice, but we weren’t born yesterday, we already know what fonts are, why even bother with this article?”
I come from an industrial design background, a kind of field that creates “know it all” designers by default, so I had a similar attitude towards fonts until I started an internship at the design agency SMAL in Munich, Germany. It was there by observing other great designers that I learned that I didn’t know I didn’t know.
Since then, I have been trying to learn more about the theory and principles, how to implement them and what the implications of typography is on product design and how it affects our perception. I still have a long way to go and this is a field I believe to be very important to all designers, even front end-developers, and I’m sure there are others just like me wishing to learn more about this fascinating world of type -cough, nerd, cough-.
Fonts VS typefaces
What’s the difference?
Microsoft Word has been a double edged sword to the design world, first of all it has given the power of choosing any fonts to everyone and anyone and secondly, it has given the power of choosing any fonts to everyone and anyone -we all had that teacher that always used Comic Sans-.
Jokes aside, Word uses the wrong terminology when referring to fonts, it uses the terms “font” and “typeface” interchangeably, but the reality is they are two different concepts. The distinction of those two terms originates from a time when printers used physical blocks of metal, but this is a sorry not relevant for you that I’ll leave for another future post. What you need to know is that a “typeface” refers to the whole family that embodies a set of letters and characters in a common style, For example, Papyrus is a typeface.
The term “font” however, refers to a specific set of characters within a typeface, for example Papyrus Bold 70pt is a font. Two more practical examples:
“Dude! Have you checked out that new typeface AirBnb created called Cereal?”
“Hmmm… If I change the font size to 16pt it will look like I’ve written an entire page”
I hope that you’ve learned something new with this super simple introduction to typography, I’ll be uploading a whole series on this topic as I keep on learning, if you want to follow me on this journey click on the big green button bellow and show some love by clapping.
And to end with, here’s one more practical example of what a typeface and a font are:
🚀 Thanks for reading. I’m a UX designer currently in Munich and an Industrial Design student at Loughborough University. Follow me and join me on this crazy journey where I’ll talk about art, design and technology.
