Letterform

The drawn shape of a single letter, with its own anatomy of strokes, bowls and joins. Type begins here, one decision at a time.

Every letter is a small architecture: stem, bowl, shoulder, spine, each part nameable and each the record of a decision. Faces differ because their letterforms answer the same questions differently, how a curve meets a straight, where weight gathers, how a shape ends.

Reading letterforms closely is the beginning of typographic judgement: two sans faces that look interchangeable at paragraph size reveal opposite temperaments in the bowl of a single a. When we audition type, we blow up the alphabet and read it letter by letter, because the paragraph inherits everything the letterform decides.