"O" Factor !

There was a wonderful article in the guardian (uk) on the letter "O" and its manipulations in graphic design.

To lexicographers it's just the 15th letter of the English alphabet. To designers it's a perfect shape for treatment: a world, a ball, a ring, a sun, a moon, a clock, a compass, a face. It's not even just a letter; it's a number, too – if zero counts as a number. It's a solid sphere or an empty circle.

A circle is a universal symbol. Or possibly myth; Plato argued the perfect circle only existed as a Form, something that we understand but never see; a circle in the real world is always merely an imperfect interconnection of adjoining dots. There again, the artist Giotto was reputed to be able to draw a perfect circle freehand.

The letter O first appears in the ancient Semitic languages of about 1000BC as the fricative consonant ain (eye). Some time later the Greeks morphed it into a vowel, and from there it slid seamlessly into the Roman alphabet. "It came to Britain around the 6th or 7th century when the Romans standardised Old English," says David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales. Yet even Crystal can't explain O's enduring popularity as an iconographic symbol. "Like the letter X it's one of the few letters that retains its shape in upper case and lower case and that, too, has multiple meanings," he suggests.

Michael Johnson ( one of my biggest inspirations, seriously i love his work !) says "It can mean so many things to different people, that I rarely use it in my artwork. It's also a very self-contained, static shape, so it is quite limiting. It's what is adjacent to the O that signifies its meaning; Think of O2; it's the 2 that tells you the story."

Johnson also points out that the O is rarely the perfect circle of our imagination. Or Plato's perfect alphabet. "Only a couple of fonts make O a perfect circle as it makes the O look chubby on the page. Normally they are an oval."

The article also reminded me of the "Just so stories" by Rudyard kipling which has probably the most fanciful explanation behind each alphabet. The story “How the Alphabet was Made” recounts how a Neolithic tribesman and his precocious daughter invent the alphabet by drawing pictures to represent sounds. For the letter "O" the daughter says

‘Now make another noise, daddy.’

‘Oh!’ said her Daddy, very loud.

‘That’s quite easy,‘ said Taffy. ’You make your mouth all around like an egg or a stone. So an egg or a stone will do for that.’

‘You can’t always find eggs or stones. We’ll have to scratch a round something like one.’ And he drew a circle.

The father’s sketch of the first O would serve perfectly well today, since round remains the defining property of the letter. Actually, the O did start out as a drawing of something, but not an egg or a stone, or even a mouth. The true ancestor of our O was probably the symbol for an eye, complete with a center dot for the pupil.

Below are some posters that were given to illustrate the article.