A multiweight font is one which offers different widths and weights as part of the package.
Typically, a paid font set will include:
- thin
- light
- regular
- medium
- standard
- bold
- black
- wide thin
- wide light
- wide regular
- wide standard
- wide medium
- wide bold
- wide black
- narrow thin
- narrow light
- and so on…
Matching typefaces is a rare skill. Multiweight typeface sets are great because designers can make use of a single font set to achieve a variety of effects, and the end result looks great.
Also, design software increasingly offers the variable font functionality. Affinity added it in May 2024 across their software: Photo, Designer and Publisher.
Today I want to look specifically at book covers which very clearly utilise different fonts from the same set, sometimes in a way which draws attention to the fact that they’re doing that. (Actually, I’m not familiar with every typeface out there — these book covers appear to do that.)
Technically, ‘typeface’ refers to things like ‘Helvetica’, ‘comic sans’ and so on, whereas ‘font’ refers to size, weight and so on.
It was Apple who changed the meaning of the word ‘font’, which now refers to typeface in most people’s vocabulary. So now you get people talking about Helvetica font, comic sans font, and so on.
