The lowercase looptail ‘g’ is perhaps the most poorly understood letter of the alphabet. Its serif form has an extremely intricate architecture that virtually nobody knows how to write these days.
Just like with the
‘a’, there are two accepted ways to write the letter ‘g’. On the left below is the “proper” form, called the
looptail or double story ‘g’. The script form (right) is much less common, and is generally only found in sans serif and decorative typefaces (and even then only occasionally). But since it is much easier to draw than the looptail ‘g’, most people handwrite the script ‘ɡ’. In proper serif type, this ‘ɡ’ is exceedingly rare. In fact, the only place this construction is found is as a phonetic glyph, and very few fonts include IPA support.
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| Linux Libertine is one of the few fonts (commercial or free) that contain the phonetic ‘ɡ’ along with the alphabetic ‘g’ |
The ‘g’ is outside the letter tree, since it‘s so unique. Only the top bowl can (sometimes) be derived from the ‘o’, the whole rest of the letter is completely original. This makes ‘g’ one of the hardest letters of the alphabet to design.
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| Components of a lowercase ‘g’ |
Despite that, ‘g’ is remarkably consistent in its proportions. Although ‘g’, like ‘a’, is a letter that designers
love to experiment with in display typefaces, your typical “plain g” is constricted to some well defined proportions. It contains a circular (or oval) bowl that hangs from the mean line, extending just under seven tenths of the way to the baseline. A horizontal stroke sits on the baseline undershoot, and a descending loop traces out a distorted oval between the baseline and the descender line. The loop is almost always visibly wider than the bowl, and extends roughly out to the ear of the ‘g’. The letter does not always conform exactly to these rules—a handful of typefaces make the horizontal stroke slope downhill, and the loop does not always close off. But the vast majority of text ‘g’s are built like this.
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| Warnock, Sabon, Minion Pro, and Garamond ‘g’s overlaid show striking similarity. |
The bowl of the ‘g’ can be made by shrinking an ‘o’. Not all ‘g’s do this—
Centuar for example makes the bowl into a second loop. But very often, the bowl is an ‘o’ shrunk to eighty percent its width and just under seventy percent its height. Remember though, that the counter has to be shrunk slightly more to preserve the stroke weight. The top of the bowl is affixed to the meanline overshoot, just like with the ‘o’. The space underneath it is occupied by the horizontal of the looptail, and the link that connects them.
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| Crudely, the bowl is an ‘o’ shrunk to eighty percent its width and just under seventy percent its height. |
The loop is extremely difficult to draw. The guidelines can help tell you where the important turns in the loop are, but getting the stress right can be really hard.
It took a lot of tweaking before I was happy with the ‘g’s loop in Floribunda.
Then I just added the ear, and the ‘g’ is complete.
