Monospaced Letters
The birth of a sign starts with one stroke since the stroke leaves a graphic stain (trace). Several strokes create a unique graphic mark to which society assigns a certain value.
During human history, several types of writing have developed: pictographic, ideographic, phonoideographic, and phonetic. However, what interests us is not the history of writing (although that’s a very interesting topic) but the visual graphic form of the signs. It is essential to understand that the graphic mark is a combination of form and counterform, or in other words, black and white areas of a sign. The form cannot exist without the counter-form.
“In modern typography, white is not a passive background for printed signs; white and printed signs interact equally in one plane. The space between typographic signs is like a power field whose lines outline the printed elements. The ornamental potential contained in the blank areas must be identified and fully developed.” Emil Ruder, Typography
From my point of view, the most straightforward combination of form and counterform is the formula of monospaced form strokes. It may sound complicated, but in the upper picture, you may see that the strokes stand next to each other at an exact distance of one stroke. It’s that simple.
From this “rule of three lines,” you can build an entire alphabet. Two lines would be enough, but specific Latin and Cyrillic letters are too wide to fit.
Definitely, these letters may not look simple anymore, but they still fit into the system of three vertical lines. In the end, you can get a fairly simple alphabet, the letters of which are built on the monospaced three-vertical stroke rule.
From an aesthetic point of view, these letters might look rather rough and rigid, but this results from simple and clearly defined criteria: monospaced and strict geometry.
In the following article, we will focus on improving the aesthetics of these rigid letters.
