The Letter I and Inconsistency in Serifs

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If I asked you to write down a capital and lower-cased letter ‘I’, you would probably draw a vertical line with a horizontal line on the top and bottom for the capital, and a single short line with a dot on top, called a tittle for the lower-case. Of course not everyone would do it this way, but the vast majority of people would.

You probably don’t think that there is anything weird about this, it’s just the way that you write these letters. However, you’ll probably notice something if you type these letters into a word processor. Depending on the font you’re using, you’ll probably either get the capital ‘I’ as just a single vertical line, or you’ll get the lowercase ‘i’ with a line on the bottom, as well as a smaller line near the top of the vertical part of the ‘i’. If you use normal fonts, you’ll never get it the way that you draw it.

This has a lot to do with the history of fonts and writing. If you have ever looked through a list of fonts in a word processor, you’ve probably noticed that some are labelled as ‘Serif’, and others are labelled as ‘Sans Serif’, literally just meaning ‘without serifs’. Sometimes you’ll either see Sans Serif fonts listed either as just ‘sans’, as in ‘Comic Sans’, or as Gothic fonts. So what exactly is a serif?

In our example of a capital ‘I’ with a line on the top and bottom, and our lowercase ‘i’ with those same lines, serifs are those little lines that jut out of the straight lines. I did just say that the capital letter ‘I’ has two lines, but one thing to point out is that there are actually four serifs, these ‘lines’ are actually two serifs, one on the left and one on the right. These serifs originated as a by-product of carving Latin inscriptions on stone, either by following brush marks, or in order to clean up edges. This then became the proper way to write in books. Eventually writing styles that allowed for quicker writing came into fashion, which are known as gothic fonts. These gothic fonts evolved into our modern idea of sans serif fonts. Of course ‘sans serif’ eventually became shortened to ‘sans’.

When hand writing something, we typically write sans serifs in order to make the process of writing quicker, as it would take a lot of time to add these additional lines to what we write. The only exception however seems to be when writing the capital letter ‘I’, which we spend a little extra time on adding these serifs in order to differentiate it from a lowercase ‘l’ or the number ‘1’.

Whenever we are writing, it is considered correct to keep the font type consistent. This of course extends to serifs, as this is a part of the typeface. It would look very weird if you were typing a document in Arial and you changed a random letter into Comic Sans, which explains what is so weird about the way we write the letter ‘I’, as it breaks the common typography rules. There are other ways we can differentiate, whether it be by context, or by making the ‘l’ taller than the ‘I’ as many sans serif typefaces do.

It is interesting that in order to differentiate letters that we have learnt to break common typography rules in our writing by inconsistently using serifs.

This is only one of the many weird things that people do when they are writing, but that’s all for this video.

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