From corporate rhetoric to consumer cliché to faux finishes and desktop veneer, truth has gone from being a steadfast principle to a silly posture. Once the stuff of morals and fables, its presence in everyday life has become an imperiled commodity. We're left with a culture teeming with contradiction: Reality TV. Fuzzy Math. Jumbo Shrimp. Political Intelligence.
Is it real or is it memorex?
If form is driven by content, then the consequences of this shaky reality have driven us further from the utopian promises of modernism than any of us ever dared to imagine.
Wither the ampersand?
In a decidedly non-utopian analysis of current design thinking and practice, the ampersand provides a unique lens through which to examine truth as an ideal and design as a reality. Bill and I spending a week this summer at the
Maine School of Art working with students and contemplating the fates and fictions of
and and
and.
Letterpress printers have long grouped the ampersand along with other assorted marks (including the asterisk and number sign) under the loose rubric of "allsorts." See the separated-at-birth diptych above: not quite punctuation mark and not quite ligature, the ampersand is a confection to be savored, indeed.
Comments [10]
It seems to me that the history of type (all letters) from the Trajan Column on has been a series of utopian desires. Everyone is always looking for the ideal letterform, and even those deconstructionists are trying to be precise about the nature of reality. I wonder how utopianism ever got lost, when everything we say, do, and design seems to be a longing for it, even still.
03.12.04
11:25
Whatever the backstory, what began as the Latin word et became a liguature of those letters and then transformed into the musical squiggle we know today. And somehow (I would argue because of its form) it came to mean more than the word it was designed to represent. In film credits for example, & represents a closer collaboration than and.
I can imagine a similiar trajectory for a single character representation of the. I propose calling it thesithe from the phrase: the character is the. Perhaps over time such a ligature would come to represent THE, not just the.
03.12.04
12:15
And for those who like to walk among letterforms, the delight of closed rooms and open places.
03.12.04
01:20
03.12.04
06:12
The lure of oxymorons like Jumbo Shrimp is in the push and pull: the sobriety and the "aha!" The push and pull of the official and unofficial, fortunately and unfortunately, (some may even say) the monumental and the miniature...these are intersections which become charged. That the ampersand looks vaguely alien in amongst its peers is exactly its value.
The ampersand is an embellished form of 'et' just as Reality TV is drama derived from some sort of truth (the truths of: having roommates, trying to start a musical career, dating) They are play, entertainment. And there's value to that.
The pursuit of truth in design is one way to go, to be sure. But why deny there is fun to be had? Who wants to be rational all the time? Is that really the goal? Imagine a life without sweets! Rational, sure, but dry as toast.
03.13.04
02:33
Maybe it's natural - or maybe it's Maybelline.
(Is "wither" an intentional pun, or a typo?)
03.14.04
08:30
- cosmetic surgery
- e-mail diplomas
- shooting grey scale with digital cameras
- polystyrene architectural mouldings
- "Would you like lies with that?"
- superfluous Hollywood remakes
03.14.04
08:37
While the ampersand started as a contraction of a phrase - and per se and - and of two letters - et - it has taken on a form of its own which enables it to travel throughout the roman alphabet-using world. Because it has no other meaning, an ampersand clarifies its context where language tends to obfuscate. An ampersand replaces "y" in Spanish, "e" in Italian and Portuguese, "und" in German, "and" in English, "et" in French, "og" in Danish and Norwegian, and "en" in Dutch, to name just a few. (What a difference a language makes: in Dutch "Starsky en Hutch" means "Starsky and Hutch", whereas in French "Starsky en Hutch" means "Starsky in Hutch", which is a different kind of movie. Only an ampersand has the power to clear up the confusion for Starsky & Hutch.)
Like many other typographic niceties, the ampersand lost its status as a player in running text and was relegated to the allsorts bin. To read Eric Gill's books, still available in facsimile editions, in which Gill used "&" to replace "and" throughout the text, is to come face-to-(type)face with an anachronism. The ampersand just looks weird when it pops up in running text all the time. (The same applies to 17th-century books with their tall "s"s, "ct" and "st" ligatures, and other necessary evils of hand-set type. It also applies to Prince's song titles and lyrics, which freely replace "forever" with "4ever", "you" with "U", and "I" with a little eye icon. I don't know Prince's reading proficiency level, but his typography is strictly middle school.)
The ampersand is, in my opinion, more useful than it has ever been, and its design should be as well-considered as any other glyph in a typeface. It is safer to make an unoriginal ampersand which looks like an ampersand than a zoomy and unique form which confuses the reader. As a type designer, I take great pleasure in drawing ampersands, and am always trying to find the ampersand that the typeface-in-development "wants". A typeface meant for signage systems should have a conservative ampersand, but a unique display font should push the formal representation of & - it should be a confection to be savoured.
In this age of globalisation, the ampersand remains an eminently useful communication tool, all the more so for its sometimes whimsical behaviour.
03.17.04
09:45
http://www.typeforum.de/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=41&mode=thread&order=0
03.27.04
07:47
But if 'we' do decide to get rid of a glyph or 2, lets all jump on the 'per mil'. And then there are those math characters that we put up with. I can see the plus and minus but when's the last time you went hunting for the logicalnot or the plueminus. And what about the curency symbol? I know, lets dump some of these characters and add a few alternate versions of the ampersand or how about.......
03.29.04
08:24