My name is Mia Cinelli, and I'm an Assistant Professor of Art Studio and Digital Design at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. I teach in the School of Art and Visual Studies, in the College of Fine Arts, and I teach courses in graphic design and typography, which is really exciting! So, I have a background in graphic design, in typography and in kind of multi-disciplinary design.
So, I have a practice that is typographic in nature, but not exclusively. So, my work is conceptual products and sculpture and installation and very strange things. And so, I think of myself truly as a designer of experiences and interactions. And how those experiences and interactions come to be really varies. So, that's a little bit about me and my practice. The difference between a font and a typeface is that one makes up the other.
So, a typeface is composed of fonts in the same way that an album is composed of tracks or a book is composed of chapters. And so, the font is really the *delivery mechanism*. So, you *choose* a typeface. You *use* a font. And so, we might say Georgia is our typeface – designed by Matthew Carter – but say Georgia Bold, Georgia Italic – those are going to be our fonts; that's what we're choosing, and that's what we're using.
So, a font family would be, or a typeface family refers to a series of weights or variations on a typeface that all live within the same stylistic or aesthetic kind of realm. So, we might think about something like Futura, for instance. There are many weights and varieties of Futura – there's a whole bunch of them. But we all know them as Futura. They all have similar qualities; they all belong together; we all know them as existing within that particular family.
And so, that's the way we know what a font family or a typeface family is. A serif typeface has little flanges or feet. And a sans serif does not, so something like Futura or Helvetica is a sans serif. We also have things like script typefaces, which mimic cursive. So, script typefaces exist with these really lovely tails, say, at the end so that they create the illusion of cursive when they live together on a page
or on-screen — they all visually connect as one word or phrase. And so, those are kind of the big three that I would use to categorize typefaces.