AN ALPHA BET


Talk about less is more.
The alphabet may be the best example if this design principle in action.
The alphabet that has come down to us has, as everyone knows, just twenty-six letters.  Yet it is the magic of written language that with this small group of distinct shapes we get endless arrangements and expressions, and the vast history of Western literature.  
But not all the letters of the alphabet are created equal.             
Take the letter A, for example.
In its special position as the very first letter, A takes prominence.  It is the beginning, the figurehead, and the starting point of the great dream of writing.  It is also the proudest letter…just ask any school kid.  It even lends its name to the entire parade of sounds that follows behind it.

Exactly why the letter looks as it does and why it is first in the series are still mysteries. Popular legend has it that around 3000 BCE the Egyptians used a hieroglyph (a picture symbol) that resembled an ox’s head.  Semitic tribes that lived in Syria and Palestine inherited this symbol, simplifying its form and calling it the aleph, which was their word for ox.
By about 1000 BCE, the Phoenicians simplified the shape even more to resemble a V with a crossbar and at this point the letter was becoming a true sign.  In other words, it was separating from its initial direct use simply to represent some thing – an ox in this case – and coming to stand for something more abstract, a sound.  For the Phoenicians, this was a glottal stop sound; they had no vowels in their alphabet. 

The ox being such an important animal as a source of power, food, and transport, it is thought that the Phoenicians were the ones who gave it the primary position as the first letter.  It is hard to believe that this is arbitrary because the ABCs are so ingrained in our thinking, but the choice was not carved in stone.  Until it was. 
By the time the Greeks inherited this evolving alphabet of signs around 400 BCE, the design of the A had morphed into a K shape and by the end of the Greek period, it resembled our modern A as an inverted V with a short crossbar.  The Greeks named this sign alpha.  Along with their second letter, beta, these letters gave the name to the entire collection of written symbols...the alphabet.  We pay homage to the letter every time we say the name.

When the Romans took over by the 2nd century AD, the A was locked into its first place position and standardized into the shape we know so well.  It was those order-loving Romans who established the basic rules of the letterform (not to mention civic laws and roads) for use in public inscriptions.  For example, that the width shall be approximately three quarters of the height, that the first stroke shall be a hairline, the crossbar placed slightly below the center, serifs added to the strokes and so on.  Typographers have been tinkering with – but never trashing – those rules ever since.
Symmetrical, solid, compact, straight and strong, the letter A is a fine figurehead for the empire of the twenty-six.  A is ancient, aristocratic, attractive and dare I say it -- downright alphable.

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