Feb 8, 2022
Tagged Glyphs in Tassanara
Tassanara Standard Script is a fantasy font I created for author, Nicola MacCameron, for use on the cover of her “Leoshine” series of science fiction books and is used for the orthography of both her conlang words in the fictional Aeolian language and for many English words and names to give them a fantasy feel.
Typographers use the ampersand in Roman typefaces as a personalized creative design element. It’s a signature character. The ampersand is an evolved ligature of the letters for the Latin word “et” which means “and” in English.
For Tassanara, I created all the glyphs for the letters first without actually assigning them to any Roman letters. Then I chose the ones I considered more beautiful for the letters used most in English or for particular use in Aeolian. E is the most common letter in English, and I thought the horizontal backwards s-shape was the most beautiful glyph.
Next, I decided to use the E glyph as the basis for the Tassanara ampersand. I had the idea to create an “et” ligature in Tassanara by placing a minuscule version of the glyph for T into the center of the glyph for E.
I chose an open circle glyph to be the T because I thought it would look good as a miniscule letter inside the E glyph. The E and T combined creates the Latin “et” for the ampersand glyph. Then, I called this small T inside the E a “tag.”
Finally, following the pattern set for the ampersand, I decided to choose glyphs to tag to make other symbols. If a glyph is tagged with the minuscule version of the T glyph, it becomes a new symbol. For instance, the “at” sign, “@,” is a tagged A glyph. A generic symbol for money is created by a tagged M.
