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Hey all. I had this weird thought: If, in some bizarre alternate history, chatspeak abbreviations like "LOL" had become popular long before there were computers and character sets, they might have, over time, become new symbols, like "et" became "&" and "at" became "@". What might they look like?

I think you need to imagine a sign that evolves from a handwritten contraction, and then apply a typographic rationalisation. Quickly, and without benefit of a stylus:

Interesting; I think the emphasis might fall on the other end:

Yes, that is nice. It reminds me of the contractions one finds in early printed books, which is a good sign.

Maybe something like this:

Just a rough sketch, but you get the idea. It's a bit abstract, like an ampersand, but you can find the three characters in it if you look for them.

(This makes me think of the imaginary alphabet that Alessio Leonardi showed in his presentation at TypeCon this year. That was brilliant.)

That looks lovely, Mark, but I wonder how well such a form would adapt to other contrast models? With a translation (broad-nib) model, you would get a lot more heavy strokes through the loops. As a form in this particular style, I think your 'rough sketch' is exemplary, but I'm left wondering what forms would be appropriate for e.g. a renaissance oldstyle type, a neo-grotesque sans serif, etc.

It's a funny exercise, because a good end result might not be identifiable in its evolved state. That's why I was throwing up some samples of early ideas, thinking they would be refined through collaboration.

Mark's work is very refined, and the balance is off in that the W anchors his character like the A anchors the @.

These would make funny t-shirts.

Part of my thinking is that it would be like the at sign, which for a long time had pretty much only one model based on the 19th century modern style. The at sign has that hairline loop in the early model which leads to varying solutions when type designers try to adapt it to other styles. In some cases, like adapting the Euro to older face, you get to rewrite history in a sense, and try to imagine how it would have been done had it existed. The ampersand is a good example of the range of solutions which are possible, not all of which are fully embraced by type users (e.g., the original and later Univers ampersand).

Just for fun, here's a Jenson-like variation:

>Jenson-like variation

Wow so elegant and authentic. If Jenson could come back I'm sure he would look at it and say wtf!?

For Barry Deck's "Eunuverse" typeface (1999), we designed a "www" ligature:

There are some other typefaces with a www lig, aren't there? I think some of Christian Schwartz's have it.

(I would guess that John won't like the way you've encoded it... :-)

What is the Unicode index for a www ligature?

This was waaaaaaay back in 1999, when we used to use those random glyph slots for ligatures and other fun stuff, instead of random mathematical symbols: ∑ ∏ ∂ ∆ ¬ Ω √ ∫ ◊

Thanks to pop culture, we habitually included the π - thanks to Darren Aronofsky's film - and the µ - thanks to the early breakbeat of µ-ziq - in our types. If some hot rapper comes up named "Ωman", I'm sure that we'll start to see the Omega everywhere.

In a general purpose font - read: created for graphic designers doing general design work, not specialists setting math textbooks, which require far more specialised glyphs than those listed above - it seemed perfectly reasonable to fill those slots with something fun and potentially useful. And the design of the "w" lent itself to this treatment.

A couple of the Thirstype fonts from this same period featured the glyph then being used by Prince as his name.

> A couple of the Thirstype fonts from this same period featured the glyph then being used by Prince as his name.

Chester, you're waaay too clever for your own good. This is some great thinking, a perfect appropriation of pop culture in the context of type. Nice...

A bit of speculative alternate history with Futura Book:

Actually, I think the top loop would be a bit smaller than the bottom loop.

And since it's Futura, it would be "Was der Fuech?", right? (Maybe Karsten can tell us.)
A ligature for "imho" would probably be in miniscules or small caps...

I think it's not supposed to be a ligature so much as a kind of evolved, abstract shorthand symbol that has become a sign distinct from the letters from which it is derived. The at sign comes from English (I think) and the ampersand from Latin, so language would not necessarily be relevant for such a thing. It's all rather academic, anyway. If one tried to introduce the at symbol or the ampersand now I don't imagine that it would catch on.

Okay, Mark, I'm convinced. This form works really nicely across a range of styles. Someone needs to use this in some books or magazines, so we can justify a proposal to encode the wtf symbol in Unicode :)

Presentation to the Board of the Unicode Consortium:
Proposal for the addition of a glyph to the standard, a new glyph named "Whatthefuck".

The WTF glyph feels like a natural to be followed by uni203D.

I think at least one form with a level crossbar (like Jup's) would arise, and the sans faces would adopt these. Verdana:

Hahahaha! This site's engine just turned my "Whatthe-eff-you-see-kay" into "Whatthe----".

Mark,

Your WTF ligatures are really beautiful... only 30,000 more fonts to do and you're done. ;-)

I can't believe this didn't occur to me before: the origins of the exclamation point, question mark, and laughter mark.

Do you really think this exercice is really efficient?

My interpretation of a possible "lol" ligature: