Typography

Trajan: the man, the column, the typeface

The Roman emperor Trajan’s military victories led to a triumphal column in his honor. The typography of the column led to a font also named in his honor.

Born in 53 CE in the modern day province of Seville Spain, Trajan was the second Roman emperor from the Nerva–Antonine dynasty (which produced the “Five Good Emperors” – including himself). His experience as a Roman general, senator, and governor of upper Germany helped him become emperor Nerva’s choice as his successor.

During his 19 year reign Trajan expanded the Roman Empire to its greatest size to date. As part of this expansion he took the kingdom of Dacia (roughly modern day Romania). One motivation for the conquest was that the Dacian kingdom, unlike other Germanic tribes, was sufficiently organized enough to make alliances with other nations, making it a threat to the Romans. Another motivation was money. After the conquest the Romans took control of the gold and salt mines of Dacia, using the proceeds to pay for public works projects back in Rome.

To celebrate this lucrative victory over Dacia the Roman Senate had a column constructed in Trajan’s honor, which leads to …

Trajan’s Column

Completed during Trajan’s lifetime in 113 CE, Trajan’s Column is a 98 foot tall marble column that commemorates / propagandizes Rome’s victory in the Dacian Wars. With an estimated total weight of over 1,000 tons it’s an impressive feat of artistry and engineering. As it spirals upwards it features 2,662 figures (Trajan being 58 of them) and 155 scenes in relief that tell the story of the conquest. National Geographic has an interactive graphic that does an incredible job guiding you up the column but plaster cast recreations of the relief exist in several museums around the world as well.

The column is also a tower – there is a circular staircase inside that takes you to the top. The top of the column used to (logically) have a statue of Trajan, but the statue went missing sometime in the Middle Ages and today St. Peter stands atop the tower.

The column / tower is also a tomb. After Trajan died in 117 CE his ashes were buried in a chamber at the base of the column. The ashes of Trajan’s wife Plotina were added a few years later. On the exterior of the base above the doorway to the burial chamber is an inscription to Trajan. More interesting that what the inscription says is how it says it. The beautiful letter forms of the typography became inspiration for letter artists and designers, which leads to …

The letterforms on Trajan’s Column inspired the font Trajan.

Trajan the Typeface

Trajan the typeface was created in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe. She used the very old lettering on Trajan’s column as inspiration for a very new typeface. The letter forms found on Trajan’s column are known as Roman square capitals which are the basis for our uppercase letters. Roman square capital letters were used primarily for engravings and can be found around ancient Roman sites (the Pantheon, the Arch of Titus, etc).

Trajan has appeared on many many movie posters. — Starting in the early 1990s, Trajan has appeared on many *many* movie posters.

From its debut in 1989 Trajan quickly became a very popular typeface and particularly for movies. Its first movie poster appearance was 1991’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord. In the early ‘90s it was thee typeface for dramatic films but spread to appearing across genres. Eventually the movie poster/packaging market was so saturated with Trajan that more serious films began to use other typefaces and so Trajan shifted to only really appearing in horror movies, B-movies, and straight-to-video movies. Trajan’s elegant letter forms were being employed to add gravitas to movies that might not be so great.

In less than a decade (less time than Trajan the man ruled the Roman Empire) Trajan the typeface rose and fell in popularity. You still see it from time to time – some new movies use Trajan, some politicians use it much like politicians did a few thousand years ago – but Trajan no longer rules like it once did in the 90s or the 1990s.

A tour to the top of Trajan’s Column.

Learn more about Trajan’s rise & fall of being the serious movie typeface.

V, U, Double U

Before the letter U existed the letter V served as both letters. The letter W was literally double U’s.

The alphabet we use today, with 26 letters, is descendant from the Latin/Roman alphabet (the alphabet ancient Romans used to write Latin) which had 23 letters. The letter U wasn’t a part of the original Latin alphabet but that’s not to say that the U sound didn’t exist. The V letter form did double duty in the Latin alphabet, serving as both the consonant V sound and the vowel U sound. A reader knew which sound to make from the context of what word the letter was in (just like how many of our letters are read today).

The first recorded separation of U and V took place in 1386 in the Gothic alphabet. Initially U was just a different shape for the letter V (similar to how the letter J started off as a different way to write the letter I). The U and V shapes were used interchangeably but a rule formed to use the V shape when it was at the beginning of a word and to use the curved U shape if it was in the middle or end of a word (regardless of the intended letter sound). It wasn’t until the 17th century that the letter U became the letter we think of today, assisted in 1629 by printer Lazare Zetzner who made a clear distinction between the V shape and the U shape.

Today, despite the letters V and U having been separate letters for several centuries, we still see relatively modern buildings that feature the sharp V shape in place of the letter U. These are typically buildings in the classic Roman architectural style (city halls, courthouses, etc.) that have chosen to engrave their Us as Vs as a stylistic nod to the Latin alphabet and ancient Rome.

Double U’s

Like the letter U, the letter W was also not a part of the original Latin alphabet. Over in England the Old English alphabet, in use from the 8th to the 12th centuries and was descendant from the Latin alphabet, also did not have the letter W. Unlike the Latin alphabet though (and confusingly) the Old English alphabet did have the letter U but not V.

So when it came time to write the W sound, the English initially used two U’s sitting beside one another (looking very much like our modern W shape). Then in the 8th century they switched to using the rune Wynn (ƿ) to represent this sound, but around 1300 they changed their minds and went back to writing it as UU. The clue being in the name, this is why the letter is called “double U.” The name “double U” continued even as the visual design of the letter became more like two V’s placed together.

As typefaces were created for the printing press, some began to create a letter form for W. For the typefaces that did not have this letter, printers continued to place two U’s beside one another. Today the letter W is its own letter and not double U’s.

Added info: while the Latin alphabet is the basis for many western writing systems, not all languages use the letters the same way. In English the letter W is pronounced like “wuh” but in German the letter W is pronounced more like a V, which makes the name Wolfgang more like “Volfgang”. In Welsh the letter W is a vowel.

Also, from 1928 until 2013 it was illegal to use the letter W in Turkey (as well as the letters Q and X). This was part of a policy by the Turkish government to force its people to speak Turkish and to make it difficult to write in other languages.

House Numbers & Chinoiserie

The style of common American house numbers was influenced by Chinese design.

There is a fairly ubiquitous design style to the address numbers on American houses. While there are some variations to the design it’s essentially a brush script typeface.

The earliest example of this typeface is the 1927 H. W. Knight & Son catalog of letters & numbers, a catalog of physical type to be used in signage, monuments, headstones, etc. Described as simply “Door Numbers” with no comment on the design, the catalog offers two different styles of numbers with the other being more of a traditional serif typeface. It’s the brush script set of numbers though that we see most frequently, but why?

A collection of houses with variations of the typeface found in the Knight & Son catalog.

Chinoiserie

From the late 17th through the 18th century there was a European fascination with things from the East and in particular China. Europeans emulated the Chinese decorative style and incorporated it into their own work. “Chinoiserie” is essentially French for “Chinese style” and came to encapsulate this orientalist movement of European produced creations that were designed in a (sometimes loose interpretation of) Chinese style. In the 19th century there was a Chinoiserie revival which lasted into the 1920s. The Art Deco movement was strongly influenced by designs from China (just look at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre). Which brings us back to H. W. Knight & Son in 1927.

The Chinoiserie revival of the 19th century extended into the Art Deco of the 1920s.

The design of the H.W. Knight house numbers was influenced by the Art Deco Chinoiserie style of the day. Looking at traditional Chinese calligraphy as well as more modern Chinese inspired fonts it’s easy to draw a connection between these house numbers and Chinese designs. In 2006 Hoefler&Co. created the font Bayside which is a new font inspired by the H. W. Knight & Son typeface.

Drawing on the script numbers from the the 1927 H. W. Knight & Son catalog, Hoefler&Co. created the font Bayside.

Uppercase & Lowercase

The terms we use for different letterforms come from how they were stored.

In the beginning, there were capital letters (majuscule letters). The written languages of the Ancient Greeks and Romans were both in all caps. The Roman square capitals and the Roman calligraphic script eventually generated Uncial script. Uncial was used between the 4th and 8th centuries and continued the style of all caps. Around the late 8th century however, the Benedictine monks of Corbie Abbey in France began using a new style of writing which became the Carolingian script. Carolingian could be written faster than Uncial script because it used a new style of letters: lowercase (minuscule letters). What this meant was that some European countries now had two different styles for each letter of the alphabet. These different letterforms meant the same things, and were pronounced the same ways, but they looked different.

While these letterforms started off isolated to their respective styles of writing, over the centuries they began to commingle. This merger of letterforms was partially inspired by the decorative initial caps in illuminated manuscripts. It wasn’t until the 14th century that grammatical rules began to define when to use a majuscule letterform in otherwise minuscule text (such as capitalizing the start of a sentence, or someone’s name, etc).

Uncial script on the left (a portion taken from The Book of Kells) compared to Carolingian script on the right.

Majuscule minuscule, uppercase lowercase

Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press to Europe in 1439. The printing press allowed individual metal letters to be assembled together to print information. All of these metal letters were organized into trays/drawers/cases. The majuscule letters were used less often and so were placed higher up. The minuscule letters were used the most and were placed the closest to the worker setting the type. Because of their position these higher elevated majuscule letters became known as “uppercase” while the easier to reach minuscule letters became “lowercase.”

An explanation of uppercase and lowercase letters and how these terms originated with the printing press.

Added bonus: Not all languages have uppercase and lowercase letters. Unicase languages include Arabic, Hebrew, and Georgian to name a few. That said, while Arabic doesn’t have the capitalization rules that Latin derived languages now have, Arabic does utilize the IMFI writing system. Based on the position of the letter in a word or sentence (initial, medial, final, or isolated), one of four different shapes are used. So instead of the two letter form variations that the Roman alphabet has Arabic has four but for different reasons.

Comic Sans

The typeface designed for children that, through misuse, has became the butt of designer jokes.

In 1994 Microsoft designer Vincent Connare was tasked with creating a new typeface for the children’s program Microsoft Bob. To appeal to kids, Connare created a typeface that mimicked the letterforms found in comic books. Thus was born, Comic Sans.

Comic Sans was widely distributed with Windows 95 as well as with every Macintosh by 1996. This meant that almost everyone who owned a computer had access to Comic Sans. People were free to use the font in anyway they saw fit. Comic Sans, the playful typeface intended for children, soon found itself being misused on everything from local government memos, to resumes, to lost pet signs, etc. It’s these kinds of misuses that made Comic Sans the butt of so many jokes and the target of so much derision. Thus began Comic Sans’ ignominious distinction as one of the worst fonts ever made.

Just a few of the ridiculous uses of Comic Sans in the wild.

Greater Accessibility

Despite people’s low opinion of it, Comic Sans has advantages over other fonts. In mimicking the handwriting style of comic book fonts the letters of Comic Sans have irregular lines. The letters aren’t perfectly straight nor do they have or perfectly even curves. These irregularities make Comic Sans a more accessible font for people with dyslexia. Numerous dyslexia associations have said that Comic Sans is the best font for dyslexics because of its “character disambiguation” and “variation in letter heights.”

Ultimately it’s easy to make fun of Comic Sans because of how people have misused it, but these jokes say more about the person who chose to use Comic Sans than the font itself. Comic Sans is a font designed for children, not for general use. Most people aren’t designers and they’re simply picking something different, something fun. But as a rule of thumb, unless you are designing for children, it’s probably best to not use Comic Sans.

Indiana Jones and the Letter “J”

The letter “J” was the last letter added to the alphabet and probably wouldn’t have been a part of the crusaders’ trap.

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Indy has to retrieve the Holy Grail in order to stop the Nazis and save his father – a classic MacGuffin. Between him and the Grail however are a series of traps constructed by knights of the First Crusade. One of these traps is a floor with flat stones individually marked with various letters of the alphabet. He is “to proceed in the footsteps of the word” and only step on the floor stones that spell the name of God. The name of God in this case is Jehovah but Indy makes the mistake of stepping on the letter “J” whereby the floor crumbles. He then remembers that in the Latin alphabet the first letter in the name Jehovah is actually an “I”.

the last letter of the alphabet

Jehovah in Latin was originally spelled “Iehouah” with a capital “I” because the letter “J” hadn’t been invented yet. This also means that Jesus’s name wasn’t “Jesus” in his lifetime. In Hebrew he was Yeshua or Yehoshua, or in Aramaic he was Isho or Yeshu. For a long time the letter “J” was just a fancy way of writing the letter “I”. It wasn’t until 1524 that Italian grammarian Gian Giorgio Trissino proposed separating the two letter forms to become two separate letters with two separate sounds, and in so doing made the letter “J” the last letter added to our alphabet.

This raises a typographical problem with the film. The letter “J” is part of the trap but it didn’t become a part of the alphabet until after 1524, a few hundred years after the First Crusade which was from 1096-1099. So we have to conclude that either:

the knights didn’t build the trap for more than 400 years after the First Crusade, or …
every now and then the immortal knight of the Grail updates the trap to include new letter forms over the centuries to keep the trap up to date with the times, or …
the writers of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade didn’t do much alphabet research and incredibly audiences were willing to overlook such a flagrant error.