An alphabet is a writing system based on a set of letters, each representing a different sound. When combined, these elements provide a visual representation of language, forming syllables, words, and sentences. Multiple languages can use one alphabet, with more or less specific variations to better suit each language.

Example: French, English and Italian use the Latin alphabet, also called Latin script.

FUNCTION

The ampersand is a glyph used in titles, company, or brand names with combined words to replace “and.”

HISTORY

During the Middle Ages in Europe, books were mainly produced to distribute religious texts. For that reason, most texts were written in Latin, even after Gutenberg’s invention of metal-type printing in 1450. The letters e and t (for et meaning “and” in Latin) were used so often that punch-cutters combined the letters to create a single character et, first as a ligature and later as a character on its own.

DESIGN

The ampersand has many design possibilities, from an original combination of the letters e and t to more flourished variations. Its top is often aligned with the uppercase and/or figures to give it enough space to be legible.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

The ampersand is mostly used as a decorative addition in titles or brands to represent the word “and” (or equivalent in other languages). It is better to use the word “and” in body-size texts.

FUNCTION

The at sign (@) is used in email addresses to indicate a domain name or a social media account tag.

HISTORY

The origins of how and why the at sign was created and why it looks the way it does remain unclear. Allegedly, it has been created as a symbol to measure weight or quantity (to signify “at the rate of”) in some parts of Europe since the 14th century. That symbol looked more or less the same as the modern “at sign”: with a letter a circled by an elongated tail.

Since the use of email addresses, it is used to indicate at which domain name it is hosted.

DESIGN

The at sign is commonly designed as a lowercase a with a tail surrounding the letter. Due to the sign’s visual complexity, there are many solutions to simplify it by making the tail shorter (not entirely enclosing the a) or by starting the tail directly from the top instead of the bottom of the stem.

In type design, Bézier curves are used to draw contours on digital applications with vectors drawn by placing points and handles. This technology allows us to rasterize digital shapes and keep their quality.

HISTORY

Bézier curve technology was developed by French mathematician and physicist Paul de Casteljau in 1959. Working at that time for the automobile brand Citroën, de Casteljau developed a mathematical formula to improve the design process of car bodies. French engineer Pierre Bézier used the same technology in 1962 for Renault (another automobile brand) to create shapes using digital tools. It wasn’t until 1985, when Citroën lifted its industrial secrecy clause, that de Casteljau could speak about his work and Pierre Bézier was able to publicly mention the origins of his own.

In 1982, Bézier curves were used by the American computer scientist John Warnock to develop a technology for describing and positioning digital shapes and contours for the company that he co-founded with Charles Geschke: Adobe Systems.

MORE

There are two types of Bézier curves: cubic and quadratic.

A cubic Bézier curve section requires the positioning of four points (two points and two handles), creating three sections between each point. The overall shape resembles a cubic shape, hence the name. Postscript font formats use cubic curves.

Quadratic curves are formed by three points (two points and one control point) to create a curve, with two sections cut halfway through to determine where the curve turns to the other point. TrueType font formats use quadratic curves.

The word calligraphy comes from the Greek kalos, meaning “beautiful,” and graphein, meaning “to write.” Together, it means “to write beautifully.”

Many civilizations around the world have practiced calligraphy (and continue to do so today) using a variety of tools: brush, pen, quill, broad nib pen or brush, etc. Most even consider it to be an art form.

Today, we tend to describe a calligraphic style typeface when it is inspired by letters and characters written with a calligraphy tool, following certain calligraphy styles. However, it is slightly different from “script” or “handwritten” styles, as these refer to handwritten shapes which are free from any particular calligraphic style.

In applications and tools that can process texts, to capitalize (or to set in All-Caps) is to transform every selected lowercase letter into its capital variant.

With the many styles and designs of typefaces that exist, it can be difficult to describe, sort, or even find them in a catalog that isn’t familiar to the user.

Each writing system has its own typeface classification categories that best suit its nature and history. As aesthetic values differ from one culture to another, the same (or similar) style may not convey the same impression across different scripts, and one category considered a convention for one script is not always relevant to others.

For example, Latin typefaces have been sorted into multiple classification systems since the beginning of metal typesetting. Here are some of them:

• Thibaudeau, by French typographer Francis Thibaudeau in 1921, with four categories: Elzévirs, Didots, Égyptiennes and Antiques;
• Vox (or Vox-Thibaudeau), by French historian Maximilien Vox in 1954, who started with the Thibaudeau classification as a basis and added more to include in the additional styles from the typefaces from Deberny & Peignot type foundry’s library;
• Vox-ATypI, with additional categories and subcategories by the ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) from 1962 to 2021.

Today, classification systems vary from one type foundry to another, using more or less “standardized” terms better suited to their own catalog or the scripts covered. These boxes also help users find what they are looking for in a wide variety of choices. They are not rules to be followed to the letter. Imagination and creativity shouldn’t be confined!

Letters, characters and other glyphs of every script are written with a specific number of strokes of a particular shape. This is the glyph construction.

This construction went through multiple evolutions over time and at different pace for each script, being influenced by various circumstances (tools in use, style preferences, needs, etc.).

The contrast is the relationship between a glyph’s thick and thin parts.

The thickness variation in a stroke comes originally from handwriting, as a result of the tool’s reaction to the medium in combination with how it is held and the writer’s movements.
Nowadays, in Latin type design, we speak of a vertical contrast when the vertical parts are thicker than the horizontal ones, it is its “natural” contrast. And the opposite is known as a reversed or inverted contrast.

But these concepts only apply to scripts that evolved using tools and a medium that creates such contrast “naturally”, which is not universal for all. For example, the Hebrew script’s contrast would naturally be distributed the other way around.

Every currency symbol carries one function: to give a financial value to numbers. Each of them evolved through time. Some of them disappeared or have been modified to follow the needs of various civilisations.

For most of them, currency symbols are made of Latin letters with various levels of modifications (US dollar $, Euro €, Vietnamese dong ₫). Some of them can simply” be letters (Swiss CHF) or a character on their own (Chinese Yuan 元).

DESIGN

Currency symbols need to be designed in a good balance with figures, as they are combined with them.

In a typeface family with a wide range of weights, currency symbols of the lightest styles can easily carry every stroke and conventional details. But as the style gets bolder, these can be tricky to keep, especially when too many details darken the symbol to a point where it is hardly recognizable. The most common solution is to simplify the symbol by removing some “less” important parts while keeping the symbol’s legibility.

USAGE

Among the multiple types of dashes (yes, there are many!), the most common ones are:

1. en dash, used:

• to indicate a list;
• to indicate a closed range (as a substitute of words ‘to’ or ‘between’);
• (less common) to hide letters in a word;
• to connect words in compounds (in some languages)

2. em dash, used:

• to indicate lines in a dialogue;
• (less common) to hide entire words or part of one.

Both en and em dashes are also used to enclose a section of a sentence, just like a pair of parentheses, or to indicate a separation within a sentence like a colon or semicolon.

HISTORY

Before the adoption of any punctuation standard, markers of various forms were used by scribes to indicate pauses. Dashes of various lengths have been used for many kinds of roles through the centuries, and across countries. But for dash-like symbols, these evolutions left us with the en dash and em dash as principal successors.

DESIGN

Their length has been standardized during the metal type printing era (in Europe and North America), using the size of the font as a reference for their measurement as such:

• 1 em = the font size;
• length of em dash = 1 em (or sometimes the width of letter M of the font);
• length of en dash = 1/2 of 1 em (or sometimes the width of letter n of the font).

Both are placed at the optical middle height between the baseline and ascenders. In a typeface style with contrast, the thickness of the dashes has to be visually consistent with that of the thin parts.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

Generally, in American English, it is preferred to use the em dash without space; and in British English, the en dash with a space before and after.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED

The en dash is particularly often confused with the hyphen (U+2010), the mathematical sign minus − (U+2212), or the hyphen-minus - (U+002D).

In digital fonts, each of these glyphs has its own Unicode. They are designed and can be accessed individually. But on modern keyboards—inherited from typewriter keyboards which had to make compromises on the number of glyphs due to the limited space available—we are still (mistakenly and without always knowing) often typing the hyphen-minus instead of the hyphen or the en dash. Thankfully, most intelligent text processing apps automatically replace the hyphen-minus with the correct glyph depending on the context.

Diacritics are markers added to letters. They can be above, below, or attached to a letter. In most languages and scripts using diacritics, these bring to the letter a different sound than that of the letter by itself.

LATIN ALPHABET

The Latin script is used in a large number of languages. Most of them use diacritics to bring (sometimes very subtle) variations of sound to letters. The quality of the sound of a diacritic can be different from one language to another. An example with the cedilla ç, used in French, Portuguese, and Turkish. Other languages even use multiple diacritics combined together with the same letter (like in Vietnamese with ở).

ARABIC SCRIPT

In the Arabic script, letters have different pronunciations depending on which diacritic is attached to them (or not there), and the language in use.

CHINESE PINYIN

In Mainland China during the 1950s, a new phonetic transcription system was created to make Chinese learning easier: Pinyin, which borrows Latin alphabet letters combined with diacritics as tone markers.

DESIGN

When creating a typeface, diacritics are designed as individual glyphs and are then combined with letters as components in type design applications. They need to be:

• visually aligned to the same height with one another (for those placed in the same area);
• have consistent weight and color;
• placed in a position with the letter that feels “natural” for each language.

Display (or Titling) typefaces are designed and used at large sizes to catch the reader’s attention (in posters, billboards, newspaper or magazine titles, covers, etc.).

In order to do so, they have more elaborate designs and/or exaggerated details than typefaces for running text.

Glyphs from every script are written with a specific stroke order and drawn in a specific direction. This is called the ductus (from Latin ducere, meaning “to lead,” “to pull”). It took multiple evolution phases for characters to look as they do today. Most ductus changes were for characters to be written more easily (and/or faster) with the tools used.

FUNCTION

The exclamation mark is placed at the end of a sentence to indicate an exclamation (obviously!).

HISTORY

There is a theory that early exclamation marks were used by early manuscript copyists in Europe, who wrote the Latin word ‘io’ (sort of ‘hurray’), which evolved into a vertical stroke (formerly i) on top of a dot (formerly o). Other languages use different marks for the same purpose (as in Armenian or Burmese).

DESIGN

The top of the exclamation mark is optically aligned to the cap height, with a period at its base. The shape of the vertical stem can be designed to match the typeface (contrast, rounded tip, etc.).

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

In English and in many other languages, there is no space before the exclamation mark. But in French, there is a non-breaking space. And in Spanish, a reversed exclamation mark is placed at the beginning of the sentence, with the upright one at the end, with no space.

Expansion is one of the multiple contrast types of Latin type design (along with translation and rotation).

The specificities of the expansion contrast come from the pressure applied while writing a stroke with a fountain pen or quill (the two flexible tips split with added pressure), while keeping a vertical axis of the pen tip.

Bodoni and Didone (or Didot) styles are typical examples of expansion contrast typefaces.

A typeface family is a group of typefaces with common characteristics (just like in a family of people); even if each style has its own specificities (weight, width, contrast, etc.), so do the other family member.

A family usually contains a limited number of styles, such as weights (Light, Regular and Bold), and their matching Italics. With a larger number of styles (often ten or more), it can be called a ‘superfamily’.

The words ‘figure’ and ‘number’ are often confused. But, linguistically speaking, they are to be distinguished from one another: a figure (or numeral) is the graphic representation of a number, which is a mathematical concept. Several figures can be combined to form a number. For example, the number ‘22’ is represented by two figures ‘2’.

There are multiple styles of figures (oldstyle, proportional, lining, tabular, etc.) that suit specific situations.

HISTORY

In Europe, figures and numbers used to be represented by Roman capital letters (X, V, I, D, C, etc.). With the rise of trade with Arab countries around the 15th century, the Arabic figures (themselves influenced by Indian figures) were adopted and replaced the Roman capitals. These distinct origins explain the difference between the structure and stroke shapes of modern figures compared to Latin letters.

Since the metal type printing era, a font was a set of lead pieces for a specific typeface in a particular style and size. For example, Times New Roman 10pts, Times New Roman Bold 16pts and Times New Roman Bold Italic 16pts are three different fonts of Times New Roman typeface.

The term ‘font’ comes from the French word fondre (meaning ‘to melt’), as characters were made by melting a lead mix poured into matrices to produce types in batches.

In the digital world, a font is now an independent font file of a typeface in a specific style. Another example: Helvetica Neue Light and Helvetica Neue Light Italic are two individual fonts.

A typeface with a geometric style has shapes designed in a way that follows the logic of geometry (straight, round, square, etc.).

But our human eyes are organic (as opposed to artificial), we need to use optical tweaks and adjustments in addition to the shapes drawn out of geometric tools to make the letterforms look geometric.

FUNCTION

Guillemets (or chevron quotes) are quotation marks used in multiple European languages, such as French, Portuguese and Italian.

HISTORY

It is difficult to track down the origins of guillemets, but one of the earliest books using those dates back from 1527 by Dutch/Belgian printer Josse Badius, in which quotes were introduced. They may have been invented by French printer and punchcutter Guillaume Le Bé (1525–1598), after whom they were named: ‘guillemet’ as short for ‘Guillaume.’

DESIGN

Guillemets are shaped like small arrowheads vertically centred with the characters. In the Latin script, guillemets are placed in between the baseline and x-height by default. They can be centered between the baseline and capital height as case sensitive alternates to be better aligned with capital letters.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

Depending on the language, they are either pointing inward or outward of a quote, double or single (single guillemets are used as secondary quotes), followed by a space or without. Some examples here:

• « French » or ‹ French ›
• «Italian»
• »Danish«

Note: comma-shaped quotation marks “like these” are standardized in English.

The word ‘handwriting’ refers to texts written by hand.

Hanzi is the pinyin phonetic transcription of 汉字, literally meaning ‘character of the Han people’.

Hanzi characters are used in the Chinese language and they combine logograms and ideograms.

Note: Chinese is the language and Hanzi is the writing system (or script).

Today, there are two variations of Hanzi in the Chinese language: Traditional and Simplified Hanzi. Mainland China adopted Simplified Chinese Hanzi to increase literacy by making Hanzi simpler, while territories like Hong Kong and Taiwan kept the Traditional forms as a way to keep their cultural identity.

Multiple neighboring countries that have a strong historical connection with China also use Hanzi, or did so before adopting a different script:

• Japanese: Hanzi (Kanji in Japanese) used in combination with Hiragana and Katakana;
• Korean: now using Hangeul script, but some Hanzi (Hanja in Korean) are still used in specific situations;
• and Vietnamese: now using the Latin alphabet.

Each language and territory uses specific variations of the same Hanzi. However, since each has evolved independently, they developed more or less subtle differences from those of the Chinese.

FUNCTION

Hyphens are short dash-like glyphs used as word connectors in names or compound words, or to mark a word break (hyphenation in justified texts).

HISTORY

Before the printing presses and machines appeared, scribes used various markings in addition to the letters or characters as signs of punctuation. For the same function, they were often different from one country to another, and could even be different from one writer to another. In Ancient Greek manuscripts—when spaces were not used to separate words yet—there was a symbol in the shape of a curved underline used to connect two letters of a word. The name of the hyphen even comes from Ancient Greek: “hypó hén”, meaning “under one.” Since placing characters under letters with Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press was complicated, the hyphen moved upward to the middle height.

Later, with the limited space on typewriter keyboards, engineers had to make a compromise and put every similar glyph together under one key. This was the case for the en dash, hyphen, and minus signs (the latter two even became a hybrid hyphen-minus).

DESIGN

The hyphen is the shortest dash , and is placed at the same height as its siblings at middle height of letters.

In a typeface style with contrast, the hyphen’s thickness must be visually consistent with that of the thin parts.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

The hyphen has no spaces before or after it. See Hyphenation for information on how to use hyphens in a justified text.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED

It is often confused with the mathematical sign minus − (U+2212), which is usually longer than the hyphen, the hyphen-minus - (U+002D), or even with the en dash – (U+2013).

In digital fonts, each of those glyphs have their own Unicode. They are designed and can be accessed individually. But even on our modern keyboards, typewriter keyboards left us the hyphen-minus that we often use mistakenly, instead of the hyphen or the en dash. Thankfully, most intelligent text-processing apps automatically replace the hyphen-minus with the correct glyph depending on the context.

An ideogram is a drawing or symbol representing a specific meaning or a concept. It isn’t necessarily visually related to what it refers to, like pictograms or logograms.

Some scripts, such as Chinese Hanzi or Egyptian Hieroglyphs, use ideograms as part of their system.

When printing technology was primarily based on printing inked metal types on paper, ink could easily spread in the small corners of the characters (in printing, this effect is called bleed), especially at small sizes, weakening their legibility.

One of the best examples of a typeface solving that problem is Bell Centennial, designed by Matthew Carter in 1975 for the US telephone company AT&T which needed a typeface for their phone books (printed on a thin and porous paper). This typeface has inner corners to go into the letterforms’ usual contours, called ink traps.

In digital typeface design, designers still use ink traps, especially for typefaces intended for small sizes (on printed and/or digital media), but also as design features (which can go pretty wild!).

DESCRIPTION

Two construction styles are possible for the same weight in a Latin script typeface: Roman (or upright) and Italic. Italics have slanted letterforms, with more or less obvious influence from handwritten letter structure (connected letters) and shapes (softer starts and endings). In general, italic letters also have a slightly narrower width than their Roman companion.

For italic styles to be visually linked to the roman version, they have to be related to each other (similar weight, height, etc.). However, they also need to be different enough so the reader can easily identify one from the other. Managing a good balance between differentiation and similarity is part of the typeface designer’s expertise to design a “nice couple”.

HISTORY

The use of roman and italic styles as we do today started with the early printers of the 15th century, who used both styles for various applications to convey different impressions (emphasis, comments, etc.). During the Renaissance in Europe, when the Humanist movement came into popularity, revivals of handwritten calligraphic styles such as Carolingian Minuscule (all lowercase letters) and Roman capital letters carved on monuments (Capitalis Monumentalis) became most prominent due to their close relationship with ‘natural’ movements from the human hand.
While both roman (upright, interrupted) and italic (slanted, connected) styles were being used, the differentiation between them increased and ended up becoming two independent styles used for different purposes, which we are familiar with today. They also got their different names since that era, with ’Roman’ for the Roman alphabet which the handwriting takes inspiration from first, and ‘Italic’ came from the English writers who named the style of connected letters after the area where they knew it came from.

USE IN TYPOGRAPHY

Italic styles are mainly used in texts as a functional companion to the Roman in a typeface family. They are used when a part of a sentence or word needs to be emphasized from the rest, as with work titles, words in a different language, or words that need to be highlighted.

Not every writing system uses or even has Italic styles like in the Latin script. Instead, other scripts use different ways to achieve the same purpose of emphasis (use a different weight or specific punctuation).

Historians and linguists consider that the origins of the Latin alphabet date back to the Phoenician civilization around the 13th century BC in Greece and the Mediterranean Sea. They created a consonantal alphabet called abjad, which was borrowed by other languages in the region for the innovative nature of its phonetic system, and due to the large influence of the Phoenician people as principal traders and navigators. This alphabet later led to multiple derivatives, including Greek and Latin alphabets.

The Latin alphabet evolved from the Greek, with a Proto-Latin appearing around the 2nd century BC. It started by taking some of the Greek letters and modifying them, adding or removing others to fit better with the Latin language, spoken by Roman civilization (which is why it is also called the Roman alphabet).

The modern Latin alphabet contains 26 distinct letters from its most basic set, with uppercase and lowercase forms for each. Many languages using the Latin alphabet have additional letters, ligatures or digraphs (e.g., æ, œ) to better adapt to the sounds of each.

With Eurocentrism ideology (main focus on European culture), the type design industry has also been largely focused on scripts used by the Western world: Latin in particular, with hundreds of years of practice, experience, theories, teaching and conventions, exhibitions and festivals mainly about this script. But, thanks to the increasing international exchanges and efforts to create a perspective beyond those boundaries, the type design industry is currently evolving into a much richer and diverse typographic culture.

The leading (also called ‘line spacing’) is the distance between two lines of text. For Latin scripts, that distance is measured between two baselines.

The word refers to the strips of lead used to separate lines of type during the metal type printing era.

A lettering is a drawing of a group of characters made for a specific situation (such as on a shop sign) or for a piece of work (a brand’s logo, a title for a magazine insert, etc.), unlike a typeface where each and every glyph is individually designed in a way to work in all kinds of combinations.

Back in the metal type printing era, some glyph combinations were used repeatedly as they often occurred in some languages. They needed to be modified to have a combination that looks evenly spaced like the rest of the text (such as f and i). Punch-cutters created one type with the letters connected together instead of using two individual ones, and are called ligatures.

The same principle has been kept in digital typefaces and ligatures exist as independent glyphs. OpenType features allow us to switch from two separated glyphs to their ligature variant thanks to the ligature alternate features (if they exist in the selected typeface).

Lithography is a printing technique that allows for fast production of elaborate prints using stone plates (lithos means ‘stone’ in Greek).

HISTORY

Lithography was invented in 1796 by German theater play actor Aloys Senefelder (1771–1834), who wanted to print his works by himself and eventually became a printer. Printing complex and elaborate visuals was a popular technique, which gave closer results to the original drawings than other techniques of that time. Lithography allowed for multiple layers, and multiple colors, which was largely used in the advertising industry. Before digital printing, some books combined several techniques (lithography and/or engravings for images, hot metal printing for texts).

TECHNIQUE

The process of lithography printing uses the hydrophobic/hydrophilic chemical reaction between water and oil. Combined with the effect of acid or corrosive products which creates the area for water to go in, the more greasy ink can be kept on the surface and transferred to the paper to be printed.

TODAY

Nowadays, lithography is mostly used to print artistic works and other specific prints, as the process is much more costly than modern techniques, even if it renders a high quality result.

The lowercase (or minuscule) is the smaller form of alphabet letters, as opposed to the uppercase (or capitals).

HISTORY

The word ending with -case is a legacy from metal type printing, when types (metal pieces) were sorted by glyphs into wooden drawers containing cases, one for types of each glyph. Capitals were in the cases of the upper section of the drawer, and lowercase letters were on the bottom.

Even though they appeared later than their uppercase ‘parents’, lowercase letters changed through much more iterations. Some of these evolutions were influenced by history (inventions of tools), cultures (preference of a certain style) and geography (influence between nearby cultures).

A majuscule is a capital letter placed at the beginning of a sentence or the first letter of a name.

Note that all capital letters are not necessarily majuscules, such as CAPITALIZED words, which are made of capital letters.

A manuscript is a document with texts written by hand.

The metric system is a measuring system used nowadays in most countries around the world, where the units are the meter, gram, Celsius degree, etc.

The United States of America and countries that were part of the British Empire use the imperial system with feet, pounds and Fahrenheit degrees.

The confusion between the words ‘figure’ and ‘number’ is seen very often. But, linguistically speaking, they are to be distinguished from one another: a figure (or numeral) is the graphic representation of a number, which is a mathematical concept. Several figures can be combined to form a number. For example, the number 22 is represented by two figures 2.

DESCRIPTION

Oldstyle figures are designed to fit with the design of lowercase characters.
They are more often used in texts as they visually blend in better than the other figure variants.

HISTORY

The proportions of oldstyle figures are closely related to how they were written in calligraphy using similar strokes and movements as those of the (lowercase) letters.

EVOLUTION

Oldstyle figures are also called ‘traditional’ figures in some languages, as more modern styles came later on (hence the name identification) as better adapted forms to specific situations: tabular, lining or proportional figures.
In digital typefaces, several style sets of figures are available and can be accessed via the alternate sets.

OpenType is a digital font file format created by Adobe and Microsoft in 1996. It was mainly developed for fonts to be on printed media and is still in constant evolution.
OpenType font files contain all the data of a typeface style in one single file, from the glyphs’ shapes and metrics, to additional stylistic sets known as OpenType features. It has also a higher glyph capacity than others font formats (up to 65,000 and more!).

The shapes used to form the words and texts we read are seen by our eyes. And our eyes and brain are organs that don’t rely on geometry, rulers, and compasses to ‘read’ the world.

Even if they are geometrically aligned, some shapes may look uneven and need to be optically adjusted to appear consistent. In type design, we talk about optical corrections.

FUNCTION

Parentheses indicate additional information in a sentence.

HISTORY

Early forms of parentheses added in text for the same purpose were shaped like chevron quotes (or guillemets). They later on evolved into the curved ones we know today.
These were introduced by French printer Nicholas Jenson in Venice, Italy, around the late 15th century.

DESIGN

They have the same height as braces and brackets (or curly brackets and squared brackets).
For typefaces with contrast, parentheses have matching contrast (thick middle part, thin tips) and terminal tips (slanted, vertical or horizontal). S
everal parentheses alternates are necessary in a typeface to better fit with capitalized text, text set in titlecase and lowercase, and text set in small caps (when they exist in a typeface).

The most common parentheses are curved (like these ones), but different shapes are used in other scripts.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

Parentheses are placed around a section of a sentence, with no space between them and the enclosed text.

Note:
one parenthesis
two parentheses

FUNCTION

The period is the punctuation symbol that marks the end of a sentence.
It is also used to replace sections of letters in abbreviations or in numbers to indicate thousands (in European languages, while a comma is more popular in English).

In the digital world, the period is often used to separate information from individual categories (domain-name.com).

HISTORY

In Ancient Rome, the period (which looked like a dot placed at middle height) was used to separate words. Scribes of medieval Europe started using it to separate sentences (words were separated by a space), and shifted it to the baseline, which has been kept as is ever since.

DESIGN

In most scripts, the period is a dot placed on the baseline. In Latin script, it is about the same size as the dot on the letter i.
In many other languages and scripts, sentences end with different symbols. For example, in Chinese and Japanese, the period is a hollow circle, placed at the base or centered in relation to the characters.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

When used to end a sentence, it has no space before, and it is followed by a space for the eventual next sentence.
It has no space before the next letter in an abbreviation. In American English, when used in a quote, it is preferred to place the, quotes before the period. While in British English the period goes after the quotes.

In numbers with decimals, it is used as such:
(European languages) 15.000,05
(English) 15,000.25

In typography, points are measurement units to describe the size of a typeface (for printed or digital media).

Several units have been created and used over the centuries and across the globe, from the Didot to Cicéro and to the Pica and many others. Today, the international standard unit name is the (typographic) point. Font sizes are referred to as point sizes and indicated as pts.

Postscript is a computing language created by Adobe in 1982. It allowed the development of digital publishing (or DTP for Desktop Publishing) by printing images and texts on high-resolution laser printers.

Before Postscript fonts were used as Bitmap fonts, made out of pixels, with more or less resemblance to the designs depending on the size of the output (printed, or on high or low-resolution screens). Since Postscripts fonts were introduced (which contained font data as scalable outlines), fonts could be rendered as shapes much closer to the original designs, even at small sizes. Postscript fonts contained several files (glyph shapes and metrics, one to be displayed on screen and one to be read by the printer) for one font, and all needed to be installed to use them.

Often forgotten when we think about the elements of a writing system, along with letters, characters and figures, punctuation symbols play a very important role.

When correctly used in a text, they mark its rhythm and transmit the author’s desired voice. When well designed in a typeface, they help with readability and facilitate its typesetting and typography.

During the evolution of each writing system across the globe, some have developed different punctuation shapes for the same or similar purpose. Not every script or language uses the same shapes used in Latin.

FUNCTION

The question mark is placed at the end of a question.

HISTORY

In Latin texts dating back to the 16th century, questions were marked with a letter Q above an o (as an abbreviation of quaestio, ‘question’ in Latin). It has evolved over the centuries into the simplified form that we know today.

DESIGN

The question mark has to have enough presence in a text to be visible fairly quickly. In the Latin script, it has about the same height and width as a capital letter. Its design has to be related with other glyphs of the typeface, where the top terminal relates to the terminal of other glyphs in the typeface (such as 2, f or C) and the dot below is identical to the period.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

In English and all other languages based in the Latin script, there is no space before the question mark, French is the only exception where there is a thin non-breaking space before it.
In Spanish, a reversed question mark is placed at the beginning of the question and the upright one at the end, with no spaces in between the characters and the words.

FUNCTION

Quotation marks shaped like commas (or called “66” and “99” quotes), double or single, are used in most (but not all) languages to introduce a quote.

HISTORY

When texts were only written by hand, even if there were no standard marks used across Europe to indicate quotes, some slanted and double dashes were used for a similar purpose. During the printing press era, typographers used shifted upwards and/or rotated commas to work as quotation marks, and typewriters adopted the same forms.

DESIGN

Although quotation marks were historically identical to commas, in some typeface styles a slightly shorter and narrower form to create a better text color is more suitable. In sans serif typefaces, quotation marks have an even simpler shape to match with the overall style.

TYPOGRAPHIC RULES

The “66” quote is placed at the beginning of a quote, closed with the “99”, without any space between the quotes and the quoted text.
Some languages use these quotes differently, such as in „German“ or „Polish”, or use quotes of different shapes such as the guillemets in «French», or「Traditional Chinese」.
Single quotes are used as secondary quotes, if they are within double quotes. A common mistake is to use prime and double prime for quotes instead of symbols in mathematics (distance, time, etc.).

A revival is a (digital) typeface which takes its designs from an existing one (most often a printing typeface: metal, wood, or photocomposition).

Inevitably, the design of a revival contains unique details of the designer, from interpretations of the initial design while analyzing printed results on paper to those on screen at various resolutions. Today, we can see multiple typefaces designed as revivals from one and the same typeface, but each have (sometimes very subtle) differences. For example, we can think of the many versions of the Garamond.

A revival from a running text typeface is considered as a good assignment for students starting to learn typeface design, as this allows to get more familiar with styles considered as “conventional” before experimenting further with more creativity.

DESCRIPTION

Sans serif, or Sans (literally meaning without in French), describes a typeface style without serifs.

HISTORY

As far as we know, the first published sans serif typeface, Two-Lines English Egyptian by William Caslon IV, was published in 1816 in London, England.
Many terms have been used to speak of a sans style as we understand it today, with multiple categories names in different typographic classification systems of Europe: ‘grotesque’ (France and United Kingdom), ‘Grotesk’ (Germany), ‘gothic’ (USA), ‘linéale’, ‘bâton’ or ‘antique’ (France).

EVOLUTION

In Europe and North America, Sans-serif styles became popular in the early 20th century as part of a modern trend. Typeface designers experimented a lot around the this style, with some becoming references, and later style sub-categories of Sans-serif: humanistic sans, geometric sans, grotesque or gothic, etc.

But these don’t apply to other scripts that evolved on an independent path from the ‘Latin’ world. Chinese Hanzi have a category of style similar to Sans, called Heiti (or Hei), that doesn’t have as many sub-categories.

DESCRIPTION

Script is a category of typefaces that imitates handwritten forms.

HISTORY

Various categories of typeface styles started to be identified from the various metal typefaces being produced for movable type printing. Metal type technology worked so that each piece of metal representing one character could be assembled and reassembled in every possible combination, meaning that each character was designed as a disconnected form.

As new typeface designs kept being produced (mainly in Europe), more flourished styles for more diverse choices started to appear, especially during the early 20th century. Not only did they give more possibilities for typesetters (for advertisements or novelty), but new typefaces were also a way for type foundries to display their capabilities in technical and design innovation. Beyond italic styles, typefaces that could imitate handwritten forms (with connected and/or irregular forms) were one of the most challenging styles at that time, technologically speaking. As one (early but not the earliest) example of such a challenge, we have the typeface Mistral, designed by French typeface and advertiser designer Roger Excoffon in 1953 for Fonderie Olive.

EVOLUTION

Thanks to the possibilities offered by digital fonts, which have far fewer physical constraints than metal types, the same glyph can have multiple variations and replace one glyph to a more fitting one (see Opentype features or Alternates), to create the impression of handwritten words. Today, there is a wide choice of Script style typefaces, with a high variety of styles (and qualities).

IMPRESSION

Script typefaces are mainly used as display styles, in titles, short texts, or even in brand logos.
They can convey all kinds of impressions from the many possibilities of ‘sub-styles’. Note: script typefaces are not to be confused with lettering!

FUNCTION

The semicolon is used as a separation symbol in a sentence between two independent sections. It is also used at the end of different points of a list, ended by a period.

DESIGN

The semicolon has a period at the top (aligned below the x-height) and a comma on the bottom (like the comma), the two elements are vertically aligned.

TYPOGRAPHY RULES

There is no space before the semicolon, except in French, where there is a non-breaking thin space.

DESCRIPTION

Serifs are elements at the tips of strokes in serif style typefaces.

HISTORY

The origin and evolution of serifs differ in different scripts and don’t even exist in others.
For the Latin script, serifs come from the combination of the movements of the brush when writing Roman capital letters (the origins of the Latin alphabet) and stone carving techniques.

EVOLUTION

Calligraphy, metal and wood type printing, photo composition, typewriters, digital typefaces, all of these tools and techniques contributed various shapes and presence (or absence) or serifs among the various typeface styles that we see today.

The positioning of serifs in each letter has been defined by the writing ductus combined with the tools use. For example, the general rule is that serifs should be on both sides at the top and bottom of vertical stems for upright letters, and none on the bottom of italic stems.

There are multiple possibilities for the shapes of serifs: thin, thick, long, short, wedged, squared, triangular, etc. Many typeface styles have a particular serif shape as part of their characteristics.

IMPRESSION

In Latin script, different impressions and feelings are associated with specific typeface styles (traditional, luxurious, casual, elegant, etc.), which are mainly due to the circumstances of their creation, usage preferences, and habits.
For example, humanist or transitional serifs are the go-to styles for long reading uses.

DESIGN

For styles where serifs are on both sides of the stems, some asymmetrical letters (such as f, r, F or P) have a large opened counter on one side. To compensate for the imbalance created by the “empty space”, the designer can adjust the serif on that side by making it longer.

Tabular figures are the same height as the capital letters and are designed to fit in the same width frame, making them suitable to be used in tables, this helps identify the numbers more easily and clearly.

A type foundry is a design studio that produces and/or publishes retail typefaces, designs custom typefaces or does various activities related to type design (logotype designs, consultancy, etc.).

We inherited the term foundry from metal type printing, when typefaces (initially called fonts) were a set of types: metal pieces (one per glyph) made by melting an alloy of lead and other metals, poured into a mold to produce a series of types in batches.
“Fondre” is the French verb for “to melt.”

Unicode is an international coding norm to identify signs and symbols used in digital devices worldwide.

Created by a non-profit organization called the Unicode Standard Consortium with a team of international members, the Unicode attributes a code to each glyph of any written language. These codes are integrated into the systems of digital devices to ensure a stable information exchange.

Uppercase (or capital letters) are the taller and larger variants of alphabetical letters, as opposed to lowercase letters (or minuscule).

Linguistically speaking, a capital is not to be confused with a majuscule, which is a capital letter with the specific function of being used at the beginning of a sentence or a word.

HISTORY

Capital letterforms derive from Phoenician and Greek alphabets when the Roman Empire started its influence over Europe around the 1st century.

During the Roman Empire, they were painted and/or carved in stone at large sizes for inscriptions on monuments, buildings, and tombstones (called Capitalis Monumentalis).

Through time, with the need to write faster, some shapes evolved, resulting in minuscule (lowercase) letters. But that didn’t make capital letters disappear. On the contrary, they kept coexisting with minuscules. Each has its own specific functions and looks very different, so using both allows a more comfortable reading experience.

The word ending with -case is a legacy from metal type printing when letters (or types) were sorted by categories into cases (one per glyph), themselves into drawers (one per font). Capitals were placed in the cases of the upper section of the drawers, minuscules were on the lower part.

Not to be confused with a majuscule letter.