Typeface

A single design of an alphabet, across all its weights and sizes. A font is the file; the typeface is the intention behind it.

A typeface is a body of decisions about how letters are built: stroke, contrast, aperture, temperament. The font is merely the file that ships those decisions. Naming the distinction matters because choosing a typeface is choosing a designer's judgement, wholesale, as a voice for your own.

We choose faces by audition, not reputation. The candidate is set in real words at real sizes on the real background, beside the face it must live with. Specimen pages flatter everyone; a paragraph of actual copy at fifteen pixels tells the truth.