In typography, a typeface is the visual representation or interpretation of a set of characters; it is their appearance. Each typeface is designed, and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.

The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers. In digital typography, type designers are sometimes also called font developers or font designers.

Typeface is the design of glyphs which is the looks of characters. The same glyph may be used for characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase A looks the same as Cyrillic uppercase А and Greek uppercase alpha, and there are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as map-making or astrology and mathematics.

The term typeface is frequently confused with term font or used as a synonym. Before the advent of digital typography and desktop publishing the two terms had a more clearly understood meaning. See font for a complete definition of that term.