Typeface is the visual design of lettering (e.g., Helvetica). Font is the specific delivery mechanism, weight, or size of that design (e.g., Helvetica Bold 12pt). Police is simply the French word for font or typeface.
To put that into practice, consider that Roboto is a typeface and Roboto Bold is a font.
Why the Terms Get ConfusedWhile designers technically distinguish between them, “font” and “typeface” are often used interchangeably in modern digital tools. Most people refer to all variations simply as “fonts”. However, the distinction remains important in graphic design for identifying specific weights or styles within a family.
When choosing typefaces, there are two key considerations: How does this type make us feel and how does this type work? The emotional response to the shape of letterforms is a very personal experience, and when readers first see type, they react to it in an emotional way before anything else. It’s a major part of why so much emphasis is placed on choosing type even when it’s not technically a part of typography.
A warning! Selecting a typeface based on the emotional reactions it stirs in us and our readers is perfectly valid, but it’s important to not base our decisions on them alone. By all means, use emotive considerations as a way of making an initial selection, but be sure to quickly analyze for technical suitability, too—there’s no point in choosing something that feels perfect if it only has one weight, or lacks character support for a language we need to cover.
In his book, “Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works”, Erik Spiekermann shows a few examples of type set in appropriate typefaces that invoke either trust or distrust from the reader:
Which one would you trust? In this reimagining of an illustration from Erik Spiekermann’s “Stop Stealing Sheep…,” it’s likely we’d place more faith in the skydiving instructor who uses the sans serif type. Conversely, we’d probably prefer our egg seller to be a bit more casual.
And it’s not just about trust. It’s important to remember that readers needn’t know anything about type to have an emotive response to it. It’s fair to say that most people have at least some awareness of general cultural and design trends of which type has played a part, and this means we can use some of these shared cultural conventions to our advantage—as long as we’re aware of how those associations might differ around the globe and change from audience to audience. These associations can change over time, too: Just a few years ago, calligraphic faces usually evoked a 1970s or ’80s design aesthetic, but today are enjoying a resurgence.
Although most readers are unlikely to have a detailed knowledge of typographic history, the shared cultural understanding they bring to type is frequently based on history: Type can often evoke a feeling from a certain era, from blackletter type that depicts medieval contexts, to curvacious, bell-bottomed display faces that instantly conjure the feel of the 1970s.
“Designers provide ways into—and out of—the flood of words,” writes design critic Ellen Lupton, “by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information.” Beyond the personality of your font choice, well-designed layouts also use visual cues, regularity, and variation to guide readers naturally. And choosing type according to the length of the text can give readers lots of cues and shortcuts to help with navigation.
Sometimes you’re working on a project and you can add another layer of conceptual fun by sticking to type that was created during or accurately references the historical period your project is meant to convey. If you were making a porn website that specialized in films created between 1980 and 1985, wouldn’t it be fun to choose a text face that was created during that time frame? It wouldn’t need to be some crazy shoulder-padded display face, just a subtle wink to the era. I worked on a project with Google recently, and while I had to use some Google Web Fonts which were modern interpretations of type that could have existed in the 1920s, I did convince them to license Cheltenham as the main typeface. Cheltenham had the right amount of personality for the project and was made in the very early 20th century so it was totally feasible that it could have been used in the films.
Trying to be historically accurate is one of those things that will go unnoticed by most folks, but as we established earlier you don’t care that most people won’t know the extent of your labor—you’re happy that there are a few true nerds out there that will be tickled pink by your efforts. I should also probably mention that if you do make a very wrong decision when it comes to type, non-nerds will notice, they just won’t know how to verbalize what’s wrong. I like to compare making a typographic mistake (like accidental inverted stress on a letter, which is when the thickness is in the wrong place) to having an eye a half-inch higher than the other on your face. People might not be able to place right away what it is, but something about your face isn’t quite right.
When I worked on the typeface for Moonrise Kingdom, trying to find a script that felt true to the time was a little tough—most of the script typefaces that came out in the late 50s and early 60s (the story takes place on a small island in New England in the early 60s) were brush scripts, which didn’t feel right for the film. We had to reach a little earlier, into the 40s, to find something that made sense. Typefaces from the 40s would totally have still been in use in the 60s, especially in a small conservative town in the northeast. This sort of conceptual reasoning in typeface selection is something that clients love to hear about and can help you convince them to think beyond the standard “web safe” typefaces. The more you know about the typefaces you’re using, the easier it is to justify their use.