What’s your sign, and how much does it weigh?

Currency symbols are almost invisible. We see them everywhere, but we rarely give them a thought, so let’s take a look at two of them.

Why is the symbol for the British pound sterling a stylized italic upper case L? It’s an abbreviated form of libra, Latin for pound or “pair of scales.” Libra is also the source of the abbreviation for the measurement lb.

Why is the dollar sign an S with one or two bisecting vertical rules? This all-American glyph is actually an immigrant. It comes to us from the Spanish peso. A stylized Ps, was an abbreviation for pesos in the New World. In English, it was first recorded in the 1770s in manuscripts and is seen in print in the early nineteenth century.

Again, a tip of the Textwrapper’s chapeau to the brilliant Humez brothers.

Optimal result…

The names sandblasted into the dark granite of the Vietnam War Memorial were set in Hermann Zapf’s Optima. The elegant, humanist font is tightly leaded in all upper case. It’s sublime, perfect.

The “black gash of shame” inspired bitter controversy when it was unveiled to the public. After so many years of quiet weeping and so many thousands of rubbings taken from the lettered granite, the dispute is forgotten to such a degree that it’s difficult to believe that there was ever a loud backlash against it.

We can all thank Maya Lin for defending her creation from Henry Hyde, James Watt and the many other philistines who would have turned the wall into just another war monument.

My rich uncial…

Why do we trundle out the uncials, along with the corned beef, for St. Patrick’s Day? Perhaps it’s the association of uncials with the Book of Kells.

Uncials, also known as majuscules, are a script form which was developed during the early Byzantine era (fourth century) along with the new media of parchment and vellum. They are used decoratively in modern graphic design, and they are employed excessively as St. Patrick’s Day approaches. They lack a lower case, so they are difficult to read as text.

The etymology of uncial goes something like, “from Latin uncialis, from uncia (inch),” but Alexander & Nicholas Humez, in their brilliant book ABC ET CETERA The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, offer other etymologies. Uncial also could have been St. Jerome’s reference to either illuminated letters, or to “hooked” letters, depending upon how uncialibus was misspelled by the Saintly Dalmatian.

Either way, I agree with St. Jerome. Use uncials sparingly. Legibility is more important than ornamentation.

At’s what I’m talkin’ about…

The ubiquitous, iconic at symbol has a mysterious historical trail. It was included on typewriters as early as 1885, and the roots of the symbol may go back to 16th century Europe. There was no place for @ in traditional typesetting, and there was no nook for the character in the California Job Case.

I had always associated the @ symbol with retail sales and accountancy. It suddenly entered my world when I started using e-mail in the mid ’90s. It was then that the esoteric work of Ray Tomlinson became as familiar to me as as the common octothorpe.

Hey, keep it down…

I’ll get straight to the point here: all caps should hardly ever be used in text and bold should never be used. Never, ever. If you want to emphasize something, use italics. You’ll end up with a more polished-looking finished product.

Graphic designers who have access to extended font sets (I don’t on this blog, so please use your imagination), use small caps for common abbreviations (like 11:00 AM), initialisms (e.g.: TV or UFO) and proper acronyms (UNESCO or NATO). Well set type rarely includes all caps beyond two-letter geographical initialisms (Mexico, D.F. or Washington D.C.) or proper name initialisms (RFK or MLK).

The temptation to use theatrical typography is widespread with so many common folks now having access to so many typestyles, but as the great typographer Robert Bringhurst says, “most writing and typography remain contentedly abstract.” In other words, writing does not communicate more successfully if it is accompanied by bold, all caps, and exciting fonts.

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.

Latin: it’s all Greek to me…

A device graphic designers employ when they’re working on a layout that includes blocks of text, is greeking. It can be accomplished by simply sketching horizontal lines with a pencil, or, with the advent of design software, by dropping indecipherable paragraphs into text boxes. Many designers call the placeholder text Lorem Ipsum, because these are the first two words of the most commonly used greeking text.

There are alternatives. You might consider using the colorful hillbilly greeking text, or perhaps hypertext will suit your next design project.

An oblique stroke of genius…

The “slash” that we all have on our keyboards, is known as the virgule. The name comes down to us from Latin through French. It served medieval European literature as a comma and still performs this function in English language poetry. We also use it as a separation of like things (2005/2006), and it stands in for or (as in and/or).

The solidus is ever-so-slightly more oblique. It is the typographer’s fraction bar. Solidus was the name of a Roman coin. A Roman pound (libra) was comprised of 72 solidi. The British pound mark, £, is an ancestor of the Roman libra. The English shilling descends from the Roman solidus. The mark which separates British pounds, shillings and pence also came to be called the solidus (£ ⁄ s ⁄ d), and it is also a typographic character which is used to improvise fractions.

Don’t forget the widows and the orphans…

Pity the poor widow on the upper right page. Either give her a companion line, or move her back in with her family on the previous page. Ignore the orphan on the lower right. His future is assured on the next page.

Widows, as illustrated above are single, isolated lines of copy (or worse—single words) which end up alone, at the top of a page.

Orphans are created when the first line of a new paragraph is the last line of a page. Orphans are not necessarily problematic.

To remember which is which, Robert Bringhurst tells us that the widow has a past but no future, and the orphan has no past, but does have a future.

Upper & lower case, next exit…

A piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, describes (and illustrates brilliantly) the process by which a new typeface, Clearview, has become positioned to replace Highway Gothic as the specified standard for highway signs.

Erik Spiekermann has recently released a typeface, FF Mt, through Fontshop, which was specifically designed for traffic control. It is already being used by the German government.