Alphabet soup
Alphabet 26 is apparently Brad Thompson’s radical redesign of our humble ABCs. Frustrated by the fact that there are some 45 glyphs in common use for just 26 letters, and driven by his young son’s difficulty at recognizing a lowercase ‘r’ in the same passage of text as an uppercase ‘R’, Thompson made a simple plan. The proposal, in a nutshell, was to simplify the alphabet so that any letters whose uppercase and lowercase glyphs are visually dissimilar become… well, not visually dissimilar.
Thompson’s idea, though leaning heavily on the notion of “common sense”, doesn’t delve too deeply into the realms of readability or psychology… and I’m finding it difficult to believe that in life Thompson was a typographer. Certainly, glyphs like ‘A’ and ‘N’ could be switched to large–ified versions of their lowercase counterparts, but what about the rest? What of ‘B’ and ‘J’ and ‘Y’? Where the hell have all the ascenders and descenders gone? What in blue blazes are my eyes supposed to grasp as they glance across lines and lines of monotonous, wholly–identical letterforms? In the absence of readily–available passages of Thompsonized text, it’s difficult to show just how hard it is to maintain your reading position in a sea of rectangular uniformity… but believe me, it ain’t cool.
Take small–caps, for example. They’re as Thompsonion as you’re going to get without creating your own Alphabet–26–inspired typeface; are they any easier to read? Sure, the consistency in letterforms might be easier at first, but they aren’t any easier on the eyes. Why trade legibility in the long term for a speed bump in the learning process? You certainly don’t learn to read every day, thus the tradeoff becomes like leaving training wheels on your bike long after you’ve learned to balance on two wheels.
Hey, I have goofy ideas all the time, like abolishing the use of crown–seal beer bottles and cork–sealed wines, but I don’t get press for them. “Chris Clark suggests full–scale adoption of twist–top bottles; swiss army knife loses several of its useful functions”. A man can dream, right?