hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

Drop #674 (2025-07-01): Typography Tuesday

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Small Signs with Big Impact; Featured Free Font: Gentium Plus; Hidden in Plain Sight

It’s symbolism exuding substance today as we look at the tiny glyphs that help make a big impact.

TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop using Ollama + Qwen 3 and a custom prompt.)

Small Signs with Big Impact

As we’ve noted in many of the Tuesday Drops, good typography is invisible. When done right, you don’t notice it, as the words just flow from page to brain without friction. But look closer at any well-designed book or article, and you’ll spot tiny symbols working behind the scenes: asterisks, daggers, and footnote numbers. These are reference marks, typography’s quiet helpers.

Reference marks are the small symbols that connect main text to additional information. Think footnote numbers, those little asterisks that send you to the bottom of the page, or the symbols that point to citations and explanations. They’re like stagehands in a theater—essential to the show, but never meant to steal focus from the main performance.

Robert Bringhurst, author of “The Elements of Typographic Style,” put it perfectly: typography “exists to honor content.” Reference marks do exactly this in miniature. They need to be visible enough to guide you, but subtle enough not to interrupt your reading flow.

Reference marks have been around as long as folks have been adding notes to text. Medieval scribes created elaborate notation systems, from simple asterisks scratched in margins to complex symbol hierarchies for different types of commentary. These weren’t just functional — they were part of the manuscript’s personality.

When printing arrived in the 1400s, printers like Nicolas Jenson had to decide which reference marks were important enough to cast in metal type. The asterisk (*) and dagger (†) made the cut as the most essential, with the double dagger (‡) close behind.

This shows a key challenge in typography: translating the fluid, personal touch of handwriting into the rigid, standardized world of type.

There’s a method to reference mark madness. The standard sequence — asterisk, dagger, double dagger, section mark (§), parallel lines (‖), and number sign (#) — follows a careful logic.

The asterisk goes first because it’s neutral and everyone recognizes it. The dagger steps things up a notch, and is often used in slightly more formal settings. By the time you need a third level, the double dagger provides clear visual distinction without overwhelming the text.

This hierarchy balances visual weight with practical concerns. Each symbol should feel appropriately important for its content, while maintaining clear relationships to the others.

Digital typography has made reference marks both easier and more complicated. We don’t have to physically cast metal type anymore, but now we worry about character encoding, font compatibility, and how symbols look across different devices.

Modern writing frequently requires more complex reference systems than simple footnotes. Academic papers might distinguish between author’s notes, translator’s notes, and editorial comments. Legal documents require precise citation hierarchies. Publishing for glowing rectangles opens new possibilities such as tappable reference marks, expanding annotations, contextual pop-ups.

But the basic principles stay the same: reference marks must balance visibility with restraint, create clear hierarchies, and respect both the text and the reader.

The most essential rule about reference marks? Know when not to use them. Every symbol you add increases cognitive load. Content covered in superscript numbers and symbols becomes overwhelming, breaking the reading rhythm that good typography tries to establish.

The goal is what Bringhurst calls “energetic repose”. That fancy term just means text that feels alive and engaging without being restless or distracting. Reference marks should draw readers deeper into content, not push them away.

Next time you see a modest asterisk or footnote number, take a moment to appreciate these typographic workhorses. They represent centuries of refinement in service of clear communication, and are proof that the smallest details often carry the greatest responsibility.

Gentium Plus is a thoughtfully engineered typeface that was created by Victor Gaultney. This font family represents years of careful linguistic and typographic research condensed into an elegant, highly functional design.

It has comprehensive character support across Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts while maintaining visual harmony throughout. With over 4,600 glyphs, it handles everything from standard European languages to complex IPA phonetic notation. Each character is carefully crafted with generous counters for improved readability at smaller sizes, making it ideal for both body text and reference materials.

The recent-ish version 7 release unified the previously fragmented Gentium family into a cohesive package with five weights, addressing one of the font’s long-standing organizational challenges. This update expanded kerning support, particularly for IPA letters with hooks, and refined spacing for better typographic control. For typographers working with multilingual content or academic publications requiring precise diacritical marks, these improvements are substantial.

Where Gentium truly excels is in its reference glyph collection (you had to know that’s why I included it today), and has advanced OpenType features for proper diacritic positioning, and comprehensive coverage for linguistic and literacy work. This makes it invaluable for dictionaries, language learning materials, and scholarly publications where accurate character representation is non-negotiable.

In 2003, Gentium received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Association Typographique Internationale, recognizing it as one of the best designs of its era. It’s particularly valuable when working with content that demands typographic precision across diverse writing systems, making it an essential tool for global publishing and academic work.

Make sure to check out the font’s specimen to see some great examples of it in practical use.

Quick Hit: Hidden in Plain Sight

What if I told you that Apple’s most radical design decisions, abandoned technologies, and forgotten eras are still lurking inside your modern Mac. They aren’t buried in system directories or legacy code, but sitting right there in a humble system font? This recent post over at Spacebar — Apple’s history is hiding in a Mac font — is not just a nostalgia piece. It’s a full-on archaeological dig through the Apple Symbols font that reveals how decades of Apple’s computing history, including:

  • Newton PDAs
  • PowerPC processors
  • FireWire ports
  • and, even CRT monitor degaussing

continues to exist in macOS Sequoia.

Corbin Davenport’s methodical exploration uncovers everything from the original QuickTime logo (predating the famous blue Q) to Boot Camp diamonds, creating a surprisingly intimate portrait of Apple’s evolution through the lens of iconography. It’s part detective story, part design history, and entirely captivating for anyone curious about how our digital tools carry forward the DNA of technologies we’ve long since abandoned. You may never look at system fonts the same way again.

FIN

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