Three ways of making letters that get treated as one skill. Calligraphy en.wikipedia.org is writing as a visual art. Lettering en.wikipedia.org is the art of drawing letters. A typeface en.wikipedia.org is a set of characters sharing common design features, made to be used by other people for purposes its designer cannot predict.
Try it
Type grew out of the flat pen. Turn the nib and watch a written o change where its weight sits.
Pen angle
30°
Nib width
26 units
Nothing in that drawing decided to be thick or thin. A flat pen is held at one angle and dragged; the stroke is at full width where it crosses the nib and thins to nothing where it runs along it.
At 0° the horizontal bar vanishes and the stress is dead vertical, that is a Didone, and it is why Bodoni looks engraved rather than written. Around 30° you get the tilted stress of a Renaissance face like Garamond, because that is the angle a right-handed scribe naturally holds a pen. At 90° the whole thing inverts and the verticals disappear.
Right now the thick axis runs at about 120°. Widen the nib without changing the angle and you get a bolder weight at identical contrast, which is exactly what a weight axis in a variable font does.
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