> Even among type professionals, there’s a growing acceptance that for most people, the terms font and typeface can be used interchangeably. Only experts really need to worry about it.

> “For most people in most situations, those terms can swap around without any trouble,” Tobias Frere-Jones tells Co.Design. “The distinction would matter in type design, obviously, but also contexts which involve engineering, like app development or web design.”

I'd agree with that. To save you reading the entire article, here's the rough definition presented in it:

Typeface refers to the set of all the distinct shapes. It's what most people mean when they say "font" in everyday life.

Font refers to a specific weight at a specific size.

Even as a web developer I find that distinction confusing because a single "font" file will usually support any number of sizes and can be rendered in different weights or even as oblique, although of course the result will be less sophisticated than using the "hand-crafted" weight variants or italics. And of course there are file formats that can actually contain more than one such "font" (even from different typefaces).

So outside of actual type design or technical specifications I would say that the terms should be treated as interchangeable because nobody can be bothered using them correctly.

I'd actually argue even type designers don't care much what you call them. Or at least that seems to go for the kind of type designers that actually design types rather than correcting people on the Internet.

Doesn't it?