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March 18, 2007
Redesigning The Alphabet
In 1950, Bradbury Thompson proposed a redesigned alphabet called Alphabet 26 that unified the characters in favor of uppercase forms with large and small variations to be used as capitals are. He argued having some letters look completely different in their upper and lowercase forms was confusing. For example, a capital "A" looks nothing like a lowercase "a", yet they're supposed to mean the same thing. Correcting this design flaw, the alphabet can be reduced to just 26 characters that look identical in both upper and lowercase forms. By doing so, reading can be learned much easier and faster. Do you agree?
Posted by tranism at 4:38 AM | Permalink
Comments
actually i think ascenders and descenders help the eye navigate a paragraph... and without them all those graphic-designer wannabe's will crash lead everything into a solid.
however, personally i do favor upper-as-lower fonts such as "zero" for heads and blurbs ...but never for body copy.
Posted by: A.J. at March 18, 2007 8:40 AM
I hadn't even thought about the leading-issue, but I still very much dislike Alphabet 26.
Yes, it would only take half as long to learn how to read and write, but you would have a dramatical drop in readability due to the lack of ascenders and descenders (except for the "Q").
Posted by: Arnor at March 18, 2007 8:58 AM