Tuesday, 4 October 2011

Blog Post 1: &

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If I were only allowed to describe this ampersand with one adjective, I would describe it with the word 'clear'
This might make me seem like a very uneducated person, but before reading chapter 6 of Garfield, I didn't realise that the ampersand is a conflation of the letters 'e' and 't', even though I knew it was pronounced 'et', which in Latin (and French!) means 'and'.

My chosen ampersand of the font 'Coming Together' says loud and clear 'et' with a bold sans serif capital 'E' attached to a bold sans serif lowercase 't' by stretching the E's terminal on the baseline. Its features seem geometric with the same width for every part of the anatomy, for instance, the stem of the capital letter 'e' shares the same width as the stem of the lowercase letter 't'. Moreover, it looks like the glyphs are formed of rectangular blocks of the same width. Therefore the classification for this ampersand is geometric sans serif.

To me, this ampersand looks like two characters living in symbiosis, both benefiting from each other.  A bond so strong, it's almost unbreakable. Without the stretched terminal of the letter 'E', the letter 't' would look like a cross, and therefore sending out a wrong message by reflecting death. The letter 'E' would just look boring and uncreative. That is why both symbionts depend entirely on each other in order to look like a clear, but creative, ampersand.

1 comment:

  1. Very good observations clearly expressed and typographically correct.

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