Hi Ralph,

I’m also working on a monospaced typeface and designed the @-sign this way:

Pieter

I remember John H has designed a charming -and recognizable- mono @.

Also: the inside not only doesn’t really need to be an “a”, it shouldn’t.

hhp

hrant: ok, I’ll take the bait. Why shouldn’t the central loop be recognizable as an ’a’?

I had a couple of more stylized, not-quite-so-a versions in my sketches, of which this one was the most flowing.

P.S. Browsing through some of the @ interpretations at myfonts, I felt honorable mention should go to Cannabis.

> Why shouldn’t the central loop be recognizable as an ‘a’?

Because its decipherment suffers from it.
Essentially, the @ is not an “a” with a circle around it; it’s an @.

BTW, I think your second one there is great.

> honorable mention should go to Cannabis.

Dude, psychedelic dude.

hhp

Raph, you might find inspiration in other names for @, such as snail, strudel, ear, monkey’s tail, etc.

A suggestion borrowing from the excellent letterforms already in Inconsolata:

http://dsandler.org/outgoing/inconsolata-specimen.pdf

While less interesting than your proposed 3-stem version, I think this has a little more left-to-right balance, and better matches the overall weight and color of the other full-height characters.

Nice - but do dump the stem foot at the bottom-right.

hhp

Oh, well. I kind of liked that detail.

Here are a few variants:

http://dsandler.org/outgoing/inconsolata-evolution.pdf

Stuart,

I like #1. Also something between #1 and #2 might work.

Does any one have objection to an uppercase @?

Does any one have objection to an uppercase @?

I do, although it would be ok as an alternate.

Raph, have you tried a lower @, one with the “a” on the baseline (or thereabouts). I know that this is a newer trend, but I think it reads more legibly… when the @ was first packaged inside fonts, it was used significantly less often than it is now… overall-line legibility was less of an issue then, I guess.

David, you mean as the default form? Maybe you mean for a mono design in particular? Because I think I remember you once opposing the idea as useless, during a discussion on the ATypI list. I remember saying in its defense (if only as an alternate) that Mercedes often uses all-caps settings for URLs and such, and you replying something like: “They make great cars - let’s leave it at that.” :-)

hhp

Raph, here’s the sort of ’strudel’ or ’snail’ idea for the @ sign.

—Oops, can’t get the image to load.

Thanks for all the comments. Here’s the one I’ve decided on, for now anyway. It’s most similar to Dan Sandler’s.

Dan Reynolds asked: Raph, have you tried a lower @, one with the “a” on the baseline...?, and Pieter posted an example.

Yes, I considered this form, but decided against it because the chirality (direction of spiral) felt wrong. This font is intended primarily for code listings, and so gross similarity to traditional forms is important. So, not too surprisingly, I chose one not too dissimilar from the Courier precedent. It’s kinda conservative, but maybe one of these more exotic proposals will find its way into an arty future font.

Uppercase @? This sounds strangely like the proposal for uppercase ß, but imho with less justification. We don’t have uppercase $%&*, and the role of @ isn’t that different.

Your decision seems warranted within the subject matter, I did like the second variant in your second post, and of course Cannabis’ variant!

Raph, your final form is similar to what I did in the NetTerm console font, but in that case I was trying to match an existing bitmap font at a particular size.

Luc(as) de Groot included a variant form in his Consolas monospaced font for MS, and a smallcap variant in his Calibri face.

William, there is something really nice about your strudel.

Oh, I see it has to be a gif, not jpeg; now I get them to load. And you’ve already decided. Anyway fyi here are the concepts. One is a bit like one of John’s.

William, I see both the JPEG and GIF images. The reason you can’t see the first one is that it is a CMYK JPEG and not all browsers will display those. If you had used an RGB JPEG, you would be able to see it in your browser.

Mmm CMYK is a no, no for the web although I do see the first image as well (Safari 2.0 here)

Thanks, Mark. Now I know how to do the images so everyone can see them.

I stuck the trial characters into a string of Myriad letters. The idea I was testing is that the right kind of spiral, even though it is out of character with the alphabet—like the &—will still read as an ’at’ sign in context, and will “color” better than the @ sign.

—I notice that in Myriad they make the @ much thinner than the strokes of the letters, I guess because of color problems. Also true for Georgia, here on screen—is this general? Of course, if the idea of a spiral is sound, how to draw it appropriately will depend on the font.

“David, you mean as the default form?”
I thought this would be a short thread.
I know now that people take their ats seriously.
Unless there is a rock solid reason, (usually associated with an undereducated cleint)
I’d always make them italic.

>I know now that people take their ats seriously.

The reasons I think that it would be good to have an alternative form of the @ sign are: 1. It always looks to me out of place, like a ’wrong font’ character stuck in the middle of a line. 2. If it were only in price lists, that would be OK, but now because of e-mail addresses it is not only on the internet, but in print on business cards, stationary, in books, magazines and newspapers. I don’t know if there is a good solution along the lines of a spiral, but a more harmonious form than what we have would be an advance.

Also because it is relatively new for e-mail, people would be more likely to accept an alternative, if it looked good. This might be an exception to the general rule that type design is inherently a conservative art.

I’d just sqeeze it. Problem solved.