Weight & Proportion By Allan Haley WEIGHT, PROPORTION AND TEXTURE ARE THREE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS that distinguish typefaces from one another. Stroke widths range from very light to extremely heavy; letter shapes range from very condensed to exceptionally wide. Some typefaces also have distinctive surface textures. Weight Many attempts have been made to standardize weight and proportion terminology for typeface designs. Univers Ultra Condensed However, none has gained universal acceptance. Commonly used names Univers Condensed progress as follow: thin, light, book (as the name implies, a good weight for setting continuous text), medium, demi Univers bold (sometimes just “demi), bold, extra bold, and black and ultra. Univers Extended To add to the confusion, the medium weight of a typeface is sometimes Typeface Proportions referred to as Roman or even only as its family name, such as “Baskerville.” example, Neue Helvetica 56 Italic and Other descriptive names run the weight Neue Helvetica 55 Roman. ITC Cheltenham Light gamut from hairline and slim, to fat, elephant and massive. With the advent of digital fonts and the ITC Cheltenham Book proliferation of new typeface designs, ITC Cheltenham Bold Typeface designer, Adrian Frutiger the concept of a universal naming ITC Cheltenham Ultra proposed a solution to resolve the system for typeface weights has become confusion over weight names. In the an impossibility Gill Sans Light mid-1950s, he developed a numerical system to distinguish typeface weights Proportion Gill Sans Book and proportions. (See Univers Family Proportion refers to the width of a Gill Sans Medium Page for more details.) Despite its logic, character in relation to its height. Gill Sans Bold Frutiger’s numerical system has not Generally, the narrowest proportion Gill Sans Heavy caught on. Even the Neue Helvetica is described as ultra compressed. typeface family, which adheres to Descriptive width names then usually Typeface Weights Frutiger’s system, uses both the numeral progress to extra compressed, value and the naming convention: for com-pressed, condensed, regular and Weight & Proportion (con’t) extended. While a typeface may offer several degrees of typeface compression, it is rare to have more than one width of proportional expansion. Surface Texture Surface texture is another variant of typeface design. Just a few of the almost limitless surface textures are outline Incised designs, typestyles with the appearance of three dimensionality, incised, stenciled, and Inlined. n OUTLINESTENCIL THREINE-DLINEIME & OUTLINENSIONAL Surface Texture SEVERAL TEXTURES Fontology is a trademark of Monotype Imaging and may be registered in certain jurisdictions..