What’s everyone's favourite ampersand?

[Ehague]

Greta Text Italic

[eliason]

What I dislike are ampersands in which the big diagonal stroke changes arc directions a few times. (This is Bell:)

I appreciate the intention -- that the stroke bows out to accommodate the bottom counter -- but that kind of stroke has always struck my eye as ungraceful (particularly bothersome in a glyph that, as this thread's examples have shown, is often the height of graceful design).

[Bendy]

Agreed, that bend always looks odd.
My favourite is Dante Bold Italic

[dizerr]

I enjoy the ampersands in the Affair typeface from Veer. I used it on my wedding invitations and they just compliment it so well.

[paul d hunt]

I really love a good wood type ampersand, here are a couple:

[Frode Bo Helland]

This one is also very beautiful:

It's Stilla.

[marcus sterz]

hi everyone,

a question occurred while designing a book.
in a small text like this, which use of the ampersand is correct?

A.
© 2003, Laurent Mignonneau &
Christa Sommerer

B.
© 2003, Laurent Mignonneau
& Christa Sommerer

thx for answering.

best,
marcus

[Florian Hardwig]

Hi Marcus,

Detailtypografie says: “Im Trennungsfalle kommt es auf die neue Zeile”. Thus, B.
F

[ppk812]

http://ampersandampersand.tumblr.com/

[PCARTER]

Here's a pretty rad ampersand letterpress bcard set a buddy of mine did:

---------------------------------

patrick carter design

[hrant]

Very tasteful card.

--

Diane, you used Affair on your wedding invitation?! :-)

--

One of my most favorite ampersands is the one in Triplex Italic.
It's an "E"+"t" without at all looking archaic.

hhp

[CanwllCorfe]

Baskerville italic, Goudy italic, and Caslon italic. Notice a pattern? :P I also really like American Typewriter's.

[quadibloc]

The trouble with the ampersand in FF Olsen, in addition to the mere novelty, is that it juxtaposes a capital letter and a lowercase letter - and they have different weights. That can be legitimately questioned from an æsthetic point of view.

Creativity and originality aren't "bad", but if a typeface is in some aspects outré or self-indulgent, whether in the design of the ampersand, or the letter Q, or some other such matter, it's entirely reasonable to look for an alternative typeface that can fulfill the same role without distracting elements.

While the ampersand, unlike most other special characters, usually was designed specifically for each given typeface even in the days of foundry type, the technical limitation of always using a Bodoni-ish version of the sorts @, #, %, and * did at least have one thing to be said for it - problems in recognizing these less-common characters were avoided.

[Frode Bo Helland]

The trouble with the ampersand in FF Olsen, in addition to the mere novelty, is that it juxtaposes a capital letter and a lowercase letter - and they have different weights.

Ƕ combines uppercase and lowercase as well.

[quadibloc]

@frode frank:
Ƕ combines uppercase and lowercase as well.

OK, that's the Latin capital letter Hwair. It's a ligature (there's also a completely different Gothic letter of the same name). The lowercase form, ƕ, is called "hv".

Ah. I had to read the Wikipedia article very carefully to figure out what the ligature was for - it was to represent that different-looking Gothic letter in Latin transliteration.

[pealwah]

http://i47.tinypic.com/xdgp51.png
pretty sexy script ampersand

[Nick Shinn]