The letters ‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘q’ all possess bowls that are incredibly similar to that of the ‘b’. Although the bowls are not exactly identical, they can all be very easily derived from the ‘b’.
All four letters can be related to each other. The letter ‘p’ is traditionally thought of as a letter ‘b’ with its ascender depressed, and given a descender. The ‘d’ in turn is made by rotating the ‘p’ 180 degrees, and replacing its bilateral serif with an angled head serif. The ‘q’ is then made by removing the ascender from the ‘d’ and adding a descender, much like making the ‘p’ from the ‘b’. The descenders are almost always the same length as the ascenders. It's also possible to derive all the letters from one of the four letters—the ‘b’-centric method is shown below.
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| The lowercase ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’, related to the ‘b’ |
A passable ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’ can be made by just reflecting the ‘b’ and sliding the stem up and down. In fact, quite a few commercial designers just leave these letters like that.
A quality typeface will, however, have a few tweaks for each letter. The bowl–stem joins of the ‘p’ and ‘d’ are usually steeper, and their bowls are more diagonally elongated. Out of the four letters, ‘q’ and ‘b’ resemble each other the most, with ‘q’ in most ways being a ‘b’ rotated 180 degrees. Most old style ‘q’s ,however, have a small spur on their upper right corner. Also keep in mind that when you have a bilateral serif (like in ‘p’ and ‘q’), the half on the side the letter would “fall over” on should be slightly longer than the other half of the serif.
If you are following along with your own typeface, at this point you should have twelve letters in your font. Congratulations—you are almost halfway through the lowercase alphabet!
