Working with Type

The world of typography is wonderful: making logos, designs, and artwork expresses voice and feeling in a small yet impactful way.

Whether you’re an aspiring designer, typography enthusiast, or you just enjoy working with type, understanding basic terminology of type characteristics, spacing, layout, and attributes is essential. Here is the basic terminology regarding type and typography to help you understand how type is measured and expressed.

Typefaces, Categories, and Styles

Font/Typeface:

Back in the days of metal type and printing presses, fonts and typefaces were two different things—the typeface was the specific design of the letters, say Times New Roman or Baskerville; while the font referred to the particular size or style of that typeface, say 10 point regular or 24 point italic (each created as its own collection of cast metal letters and other characters). Today, however, many designers use the terms more or less interchangeably.

“A collection of letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols used to set text (or related) matter. Although font and typeface are often used interchangeably, font refers to the physical embodiment (whether it’s a case of metal pieces or a computer file) while typeface refers to the design (the way it looks). A font is what you use, and a typeface is what you see.”

Character:

An individual symbol, letter, number, punctuation mark, etc., which is a part of the overall set in a typeface.

Alternate Character/Glyph:

Character variations that may be decorative, and can be an optional character within the set of characters. Not all fonts contain alternate characters but many contain optional characters that are not readily accessible through the keyboard keys. The Glyphs panel (Type > Glyphs) shows the additional characters in a font

Serif:

A serif is a small line or stroke attached to the open end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font family. Serif can also be used to describe an entire font set.

Sans Serif/Sans:

Sans Serif means “without” serif, sometimes simply shortened to Sans. This is a character that has no small line or stroke added to the open ends of the stroke.