Conrad Altmann, proprietor of Altmannhaus Creative, has been reinterpreting the visual forms of some familiar shady characters. My interest was piqued by his recently-posted @-symbol (shown below); where the usual typographic approach is to start with the “single storey” ‘a’ commonly found in italic typefaces, Conrad has instead used the “double storey” ‘a’ more usually associated with roman script. I like it!
Ray Tomlinson, the software engineer who propelled the the @-symbol from obscurity to ubiquity when he chose it for use in email addresses, has been named as one of the inaugural inductees of the Internet Hall of Fame. Mr Tomlinson is in good company: ex-Vice President Al Gore, honoured for his work in promoting Internet access, is among the first round of inductees, as is Vint Cerf, the co-creator of TCP/IP and, by extension, the modern Internet itself. It’s been a long time since Mr Tomlinson first sent an email to himself @ another computer, but I’m sure it’s been worth the wait.
The interrobang is still enjoying its 50th birthday — it was, after all, published in the March-April edition of Type Talks — and as such I’m sure you’ll forgive me for pointing out one final article on the subject. Nora Maynard’s interview with Penny Speckter for The Millions is brilliant: Lynne Truss is set to rights, Mad Men rubber-stamped, and the Speckters’ dedicated ‘Bodoni apartment’ explained.
The ‘@’ symbol’s lack of a suitably inspiring English name has generated some interest from Shady Characters readers. Not for us ‘spider monkey’, ‘rollmop herring’ or ‘rose’; instead, we’re stuck with ‘commercial at’, or even plain old ‘at’. Joseph Chow (@josephch) suggests ‘atra’ to rectify the situation, writing that:
Before its ascent to accidental stardom, the ‘@’ went almost unremarked for centuries. Widely used to mean ‘at the rate of’1 — for example, ‘3 apples @ $1’ is equivalent to ‘3 apples at $1 each’ — the symbol lived out a useful but mundane existence in the world of commerce, rarely warranting a second glance from paleographers or philologists. Even now, when it has been propelled firmly into the limelight by email’s meteoric rise, credible accounts of the symbol’s visual appearance and meaning remain surprisingly thin on the ground.