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Graphic Design vocabulary · Typography

Font weight

Meaning in graphic design, with examples

/ˈfɑːnt ˌweɪt/nounCore term

In graphic design, font weight means: How thick or thin the strokes of a font are, from thin and light through regular and medium to bold and black.

In Turkish: font kalınlığı, ağırlık

How it is used

Used when building type hierarchy and in CSS, where weights are also numbers from 100 to 900 (400 is regular, 700 is bold). Designers talk about a font with many weights or about using too many weights.

Example sentences

  1. Use only two font weights on this page: medium for headings and regular for text.

  2. The light font weight disappears when it's printed small on coloured paper.

Common collocations

  • bold weight
  • light weight
  • change the weight
  • multiple weights
  • heavier weight
  • font familyA group of related fonts that share the same design but differ in weight, width or style, for example Roboto Light, Roboto Regular, Roboto Bold and Roboto Italic.
  • fontOne specific style and weight of a typeface, such as Arial Bold, usually stored as a file you install on your computer. In everyday speech it often means the typeface itself.
  • visual hierarchyThe order in which people notice and read the parts of a design, created with size, colour, contrast, position and spacing, so the most important message is seen first.
  • contrastA clear difference between elements, for example dark and light, big and small or thick and thin, used to attract attention and make text and shapes easy to see.

More terms: Typography

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