interesting...

A few weeks back, I wrote that the lower case, roman a is the most useful letter in the alphabet when attempting to identify a typeface; I justified this on the basis that it is “the most visually interesting and complex letter...”

Huh?

Had my 11th grade English teacher read this post, she would have printed it off, circled offending, unsubstantiated claim in broad, red, felt-tip ink, and screamed, “SO WHAT?” And so I’ll try again; call this a second draft. Or at least an attempt at a clarifying footnote.

Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style begins with a “historical synopsis” – four pages in which eight typefaces, each of which is representative of a time and genre, are dissected into their constituent characteristics. Bringhurst focuses on five:

(1) aperture: the openings in letters such as a, e, and s
(2) axis (or stress): the angle of the pen
(3) contrast: the ratio of stroke thickness to thinness
(4) serif: the stroke that may be added to a stem, arm, or tail
(5) terminal: the ending of the arm in letters such as a, f, and r

Taken together, these five features aid us in attempting to identify typefaces; I propose here that of the letters in the roman lower case, only the letter a can potentially provide information about all five. This is certainly not true of all typefaces; indeed, it perhaps holds only for some serifed faces.

Let’s try an experiment. I show here, in the roman lower case of Christopher Burke’s FF Celeste, all five of these characteristics in the letter a. I also attempt to show if, and in what number, they are present in the other letters. For example, three of them are present in b: axis, contrast, and serif. And only one characterizes l: serif.

The point I wish to reinforce is that, while there are types of characters (think Plato: versions of b, of k, and so on), the roman lower case a, from an information-content standpoint, best illustrates the character of the type. It is the face of the alphabetic corpus, the richest source of each font’s physiognomy. And perhaps of each font’s personality, too; but personality is a topic for another time, another post.

15-October 2002