More on Font Weight

Typeface weights have multiple functions. 

1. Noticeable visual difference between one weight and another can emphasize or distinguish selected parts of text, such as titles, headings or subheadings. Weight can mark a definition, a name, or any other part of text that an author, editor, or typographer wishes to emphasize. 

2. Weights can adjust the impact of color. A light face in a red color usually looks pink, not red, but a bold weight in red looks red, not pink. A light weight in blue can look pastel, but in bold it can look true blue. Typographers can use bolder weights to give more area to text, to accentuate and strengthen color. Greater weight can also help colored type look the same weight as black type in a lighter weight. 

3. Different weights can tune the gray tone of text for a particular context, whether to match or to contrast with the average tonal range of photographs or images. 

4. To fine-tune text gradations to specific printing or display media. Some media and printing methods tend to darken type, while others tend to lighten type. Lucida offers gradations of weights to compensate for underinking, overinking, and a range of imaging conditions. When text is displayed in black on a high-resolution digital screen, the text can seem eroded by the bright white background, so a slightly bolder weight is often better. Also, when text is reversed out of a black background in print, it can look lighter because of the surrounding black areas, so in reverse, a slightly bolder weight can be better. 

5. Weight can evoke a visual mood, such as a light tone to suggest a light subject, or a dark tone to suggest a serious subject. For running text, slight differences in weight can make a text seem more pleasant to read. In book typography, darker weight types can seem oppressive after many pages of reading, whereas a slightly lighter weight may seem more congenial. 

6. For advertising, marketing, publicity, and other kinds of typography intended to attract, alert, shock, or persuade, light and bold weights differentiate a message from run of the mill text.

How much bolder should a "bold" be to be bold?

Most type designers adjust the weight of “bold” to be clearly bolder than the normal weight. This is both a visual and a numerical determination. For simplicity, type designers often measure weight by stem thickness, but another measure is total black area. Depending on the measurement method, a “bold” weight is roughly 40% to 50% bolder than its normal weight, but some bold weights are considerably bolder. Readers may detect weight variations of as little as 4%, and sometimes even less, but such slight differences are not psychologically or semantically effective. 

Some weight nomenclatures call a 50% weight increase “demibold”, and a 100% increase, “bold”, whereas others call a 50% increase “bold” and a 100% increase “black”. Lucida Basic font weight names are intended to resolve such ambiguities. A Lucida 600 Bold weight is 50% bolder than the 400 Normal weight (based on stem thickness). An 800 Black weight is 100% bolder (= twice as bold) as the 400 Normal weight. 

When a bold weight is used as emphasis for a normal weight, the bold must be easily and obviously bolder than the normal weight, so that a reader perceives the visual difference automatically, without thinking or wondering. In other words, bold should look like bold and not like a smudge. When a light weight is used to contrast with a normal weight, the difference also should be intentionally obvious, not like accidental underinking. How much difference is enough to be “obvious” is a question that the typographer or graphic designer must judge visually in context.

For Lucida Basic fonts, if the main text is composed in the 400 Normal weight, an obvious bolder weight is 600 Bold, while an obvious lighter weight is 300 Lite, or a bit lighter, 250 ExtraLite. If the main text is Book weight 350 Book, then an obvious bolder weight is Dark 500 (even though it isn’t called “Bold”) or a bit darker, 550 ExtraDark, while an obvious lighter weight is 250 ExtraLite. However, there is no hard and fast rule for what looks bold or light, and arithmetic is only an indicator - the eye is usually the better judge. It is often better to visually compare fonts before deciding which is best for a given circumstance. The Lucida Basic suites of weights offer several degrees of weight to enable easy comparisons. 

Examples with Lucida Basic Font Weights

Lucida Basic fonts are provided in a suite of weights for fine-tuning to different printing media and digital displays. 

Traditional typeface weight designations are not coordinated from type family to family.  A “bold” in one typeface family might be similar in weight to a “demibold” in another family or to a “black” in another. A “Light” in one family might be similar in weight to a “Thin” in another family. 

To avoid confusion, Lucida Basic fonts use numerical designations based on the W3C-CSS weight numbering system combined with descriptive names derived from traditional weight names. The Lucida weights are carefully coordinated across different Lucida type families. For example, the "Normal" (400Norm) weight in Lucida Sans is very close in weight to to the "Normal" (400Norm) weight in Lucida Casual, Lucida Handwriting, or Lucida Calligraphy. Weight comparisons can be seen on the All Lucida Fonts page. 

W3C-CSS weight numbers are multiples of 100, but Lucida Basic weight suites offer finer gradations, particularly in the middle text range, where Lucida weights increase by steps of 25 units instead of 100. 

For example, CSS weight “400” is often taken to be a normal text weight, with “300” a light weight and “500” a semi-bold weight. In this middle text range, Lucida Basic suites offer several additional weights: Book weight = 350, Text weight = 375, Normal weight = 400, Thick weight = 425, ExtraThick weight = 450, and Dark weight = 500. 

Beyond this middle range, lighter weights decrease in 50 unit steps, and darker weights increase by steps of 50 units until weight 700 UltraBold, after which weights increase by 100 unit steps. 

The following table gives Lucida weight names and their abbreviations.