Opinion | Visual Shorthand

by Simon Loxley

Above left to right: Striking but non-organic: the ampersand from Spin Regular, designed by Simon Piehl. Tiro’s ampersand, a simple shorthand notation. Classic italic form beautifully rendered in Jean François Porchez’s Le Monde Livre Classic Italic.

Designers love visual shorthand – the notion lies at the very heart of graphic design. Our written language has none as versatile as the ampersand, a ligature that became an entity in its own right, hiding or revealing its constituent letters at its designer’s whim while remaining instantly recognisable in either form. More than any other character it has the ability to look convoluted and clumsy or to possess a serpentine beauty that has led many a hard-pressed designer to clutch gratefully at the lifeline it can throw, a dull layout transformed through the power of just one character.

But so far the 21st century hasn’t been particularly kind to the ampersand. She – and if you assign traditional gender traits then the ampersand has to be female, a curvaceous facilitator, making designs and lines work while those about her are inflexible – has had to find an evening job in a new field to make ends meet, working in text messaging as the sound ‘and’: pl&, b&, ampers&… Squarer, less organic type designs have allowed little play for her curves, and the trend for all lower case lettering in signs and logos,another natural habitat, hasn’t helped either. Like Lillie Langtry trying to wriggle into a size zero frock, the ampersand’s hour-glass figure is too complex to work successfully compressed within an x-height.

The man given the credit for the ampersand’s invention in the first century BC is Marcus Tullius Tiro, secretary of Roman politician Cicero and inventor of the Tironian Notes, a system of shorthand. Tiro’s character bore no resemblance to an ampersand as we know it, a simple conjunction of vertical and horizontal lines. Evolving as a linked e and t, the customary figure eight style ampersand had become a feature of manuscripts by the eighth century, a useful abbreviation as faster hand-writing styles developed. As today, the ampersand sometimes performed a sonic role, representing the sound ‘et’, Latin for ‘and’. Aiming for economy of space, later gothic, blackletter styles reined in its form to little more than a jagged version of Tiro’s original with a crossbar added. But typographic craftsmen of the pedigree of Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon firmly established the appearance of the ampersand in both roman and italic type in the sixteenth century, with a rough convention eventually emerging – the ‘eight’ became dominant in roman, with a flamboyant open ‘et’ style the choice for italics. By the nineteenth century, now sometimes regarded as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, the ampersand clocked in Victorian-style working hours as a space-saver amid the heavy lettering of contemporary poster advertising…

by Simon Loxley