Typefaces and Fonts - Design Principles

Todays afternoon session was about learning the differences between a Font and a Typeface, two things which until now I wasn't able to distinguish between. I now know that a Typeface contains many fonts, whereas a font is the lettering in one particular style. For example, Arial Bold at 12pt is one font, but Arial Bold at 24pt is another font. The Arial typeface on the other hand includes Arial, Arial Narrow, Arial Bold etc etc, all in all pt sizes.

We had previously been asked to choose a font that best describes the 6 production methods we'd looked at last week, and print out the letters A, B, C, X, Y and Z both upper case and lower case in each font. The fonts I chose were:

Stone: Times New Roman
Sable: Lucinda Blackletter
Bone: Zipfino
Wood: Gill Sans Ultra Bold
Metal: Geneva
Silicon: Cooper Black

We were today asked to develop the capital letters of one of the 6 fonts in a consistent style in order to create our own font. I chose to develop Geneva because it was the plainest font and so had the greatest room for development. We were then told that over the coming weeks we would be developing this font into a typeface.

My Font

For next week we have to choose a letter, and reproduce it in our style of development in upper and lower case, in light, regular, bold and italic.