Whither Palatino?

Graphic designers have punished Hermann Zapf’s beautiful 1948 design, Palatino, for over a decade by avoiding it. Its crime? Ubiquity. It was everywhere after the desktop publishing revolution put it into the hands of the hoi polloi in the late 1980s. It’s time to forgive. Palatino is a gorgeous, robust font. It shouldn’t suffer because of indiscriminate licensing, or promiscuous distribution.

The greatest weakness of Palatino is, perhaps, its clunky ampersand. Mr. Zapf more than made up for it though, with the lively, energetic italic ampersand. Substitute the italic ampersand for the roman, and you’ve got instant elegance.

Ampersand…

The ampersand is a ligature, which combines e and t to form the Latin et, which means and. The array of typographic designs for the ampersand are wildly varied, but in most of them, one can still make out the e and the t.