This is where knowing a little type design throws a wrench in things - the design of most letters is… a fine balance of creativity and function. “But c’mon, it’s the drawing of the letter A, it’s not like it’s going to be exactly the same in every typeface idea.” The logic behind this one is kind of sound once you hear it: if a typeface is the aesthetic idea of a bunch of letters, how the heck can you copyright a letter A? “Ummmmmmmmmmmm, what?” You can’t copyright a typeface. Here’s a super-fun complicated detail that trips up a lot of designers who start getting into type - you can’t copyright a typeface. Fonts & typefaces are no different, and possibly worse than the norm. Where this can actually matter a lot - besides if you’re a type designer or general type nerd, like we are - is in licensing and copyright.Īs with most stuff relating to art, copyright is confusing and weird and oh-so-complicated. The one time not knowing your terminology might bite you. That makes a lot of sense to me, I can dig that - a typeface, for example, could be ugly or weird or funny-looking and not that useful, but the font could have a ton of international characters and extra glyphs and weights, and maybe that makes it a thing you choose to use. Most of the time, people use “font” and “typeface” interchangeably, but occasionally you need to focus on one or the other, like how sometimes musicians write great songs, but release bad recordings of those songs or never record them. Whichever word comes to mind, and everyone usually knows what everyone usually means.Īctually, in researching a little more on this, I found someone that posted an awesome analogy in an obscure forum somewhere: In fact, most of the professionals we know do it, too. To most of us, and in most situations, it really does not matter if you use these interchangeably. Here’s the thing - a lot of people in design can be sticklers, which can feel intimidating. Glyph - an individual drawing of a letter, of which there might be manyĪre these words actually interchangeable?.Font - the file someone designed to make that idea real & useable.Typeface - the idea, personality, appearance, and aesthetics of the letters.This could be for stylistic reasons (because a lot of designers get some value out of differently-designed Q’s), or it could be a matter of needing a letter to look different in different scenarios - there’s a lot of potential with font tech to do some amazing things, and we’ll definitely cover some of that great stuff in a different article, cuz it’s super cool & useful. But in a font, you might actually have multiple glyphs for the same letter. drawing: because the idea of a character is that there’s only one in the alphabet - a Q, for instance. This is where it’s useful to understand idea vs. The glyph will have a bunch of other code built in to make it useable on your computer, but a glyph is at it’s heart, one drawing of a character. A font is made up of a bunch of glyphs - which are just a word for individual drawings of a letter/character.
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