#71 • Mind Your Ampersands

Johannes Gutenberg established the use moveable type for printing texts in the West in the 15th century. There were later attempts to speed up the typesetting process by casting syllables or entire words as one piece. Those pieces were called logotype—from Ancient Greek “lógos” meaning “word”. But handling type cases with hundreds of compartments was just not practical and so this kind of typesetting didn’t really catch on. But entire words cast as one piece of metal type still became quite common—for example for newspaper section headlines, which had to be used every day in exactly the same way.

“This is a comparatively young phrase. It was coined in the days of phototypesetting in the second half of the 20th century before the introduction of desktop publishing. Before desktop publishing, the text columns were already created with (phototypesetting) machines, but the make-up or “paste-up” of the pages for printing was usually still done by hand”

What it actually is about is the compositor telling the poor soul who had to refill the cases with the sorts once finished with. Now, a lowercase p or q could easily be mismatched because they are essentially mirror images so the possibility of putting a p sort in the q area and vice-versa. So out of frustration the compositor would get frustrated and say “mind your p & q’s”.

Chinese characters are the epitome of balance and proportion, but the Chinese writing on these street signs was often lop-sided or slightly awkward. They may not be graceful, but these characters certainly have character. Their flaws and quirks have an energy and charm that calls attention to the work of the sign-writer. I wondered, who lettered these signs? Not a professional typographer. Certainly not a master calligrapher. Little did I know, these typographic misdemeanours were cryptically pointing to the answer.

I recently discovered that some Hong Kongers share an interest in this lively character set. Perhaps none more so than Gary Yau 邱益彰. Gary pays close attention to Hong Kong’s traffic signs. He was one of a handful of Hong Kongers who noticed with dismay when the Government switched from using Transport to a sloppy mix of Helvetica and Arial—both less legible in traffic than the original.

These days, one-off signs that feature place names or street names are digitally printed. Mass-produced traffic signs, such as ‘No Stopping’ or ‘Pedestrians Prohibited’ are hand printed using precise silkscreen templates. In either case, the new roadsigns have none of the imperfections that characterised their forebears.

I couldn’t find any fonts like that on those font providers so I went on to look on myfonts.com. I found a couple of great matches there: Larsseit, Nexa, Axiforma, Mont, Sofia Pro and Gilroy. I also knew I wanted to use the bold weight as the primary style, to help evoke that feeling of friendliness. Here they are, already set in the primary colour I was planning to use.

Take a look at the UX buddy name set in Larsseit, Nexa and Sofia Pro. Do you notice anything they have in common?

Take a closer look at the letter “y”. See how abrupt and sharp it seems? It looks cold and formal. Even sterile maybe, especially when compared to the other three fonts where the descenders are slightly curled (Gilroy on the right in the image below).

Because Arabic calligraphy follows a very strict system based on rhombic dots, my assumption is that it did not have the need to describe part of a letter but rather to show the specific number of dots for each of its parts. In a teaching context, the student’s job was to simply imitate their master’s ‘mashq’ or guidebook, where each letter’s proportion would be accurately drawn. The teacher would then make corrections directly on the student’s calligraphic sheet by pointing out the wrong shapes or proportions.

• The established terminology in Arabic type anatomy is: head, body, eye, tooth, neck, cup.

• The terms ascender and descender may be used for Arabic because it has characters that extend below the baseline and others that stand out higher than middle heights.

• Some technical terms could be borrowed from Latin typography, such as kerning and ligature.

• Do not use ‘x-height’ and ‘cap height’ simply because there are no ‘x’ or capitals in Arabic.

FT Made is a transitional serif. The first release of this editorial typeface is set in 1 weight. 5 more weights and another serif style is on the way.