Typography, Referenced

The Language of Letters

Typeface design, type design, or font design? Letter or glyph? Letterform, perhaps? Designers often use terms interchangeably, but it is helpful to have a good grasp of the nuances, if only because they reveal different aspects of the design process.

Think of a word. A sequence of letters should spring to mind. Write that sequence on a sheet of paper and these letters assume a concrete form made manually: They have been translated into letterforms. Any representations of letters made manually, regardless of the tool and the scale, are letterforms. Their maker controls their sequence and size and knows the dimensions and properties of the surface on which they are rendered. A hasty shopping list, Trajan’s column, John Downer’s brush-made signs. They’re all meaningful collections of letterforms.

On the other hand, any representation of letters intended for mechanical reproduction is a collection of typeforms. The sequence in which a user places them and the size he or she will use remains unknown at the time of their making. Their maker also cannot predict the specifics of their rendering environment. Crucially, typeforms represent formal relationships in two dimensions rather than a specific way of capturing and rendering a shape. In other words, a Univers lowercase a is a Univers lowercase a regardless of the type-making and typesetting technology. Although there are differences in the visible forms produced with handset, hot-metal, and digital type, for example, the differences reflect the influence of the encoding and rendering technology. In other words, a typeface is a snapshot of the designer’s intentions for a collection of typeforms.

To use these shapes in a specific typesetting environment, the typeforms get converted into glyphs (the term for digital formats), precise encodings in a machine-readable language enriched with information about the space surrounding the shape, its relationship to other glyphs, and its behavior. This machine-specific implementation of a typeface is called a font. To return to our Univers example, the typeface can be represented by a Linotype matrix or bits in an OpenType font, but the essence of the design survives, hopefully with fidelity to the designer’s intentions. Typeface design and font making are nominally sequential processes, even if design today closely interweaves typeface design and font production. One person may embody both roles, but often the typeface designer and font maker are separate members of the same team.