The Number sign—now and then—across languages.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

@Nick Curtis Yes, "octothorpe" is what I like to use. I'll call it a "hashtag" when pilcrows fly!

Claudio Piccinini

Bumping this thread as… soon I will finalize De Vinne but in general I am evaluating how to draw the hashtag in a pair of other typefaces as well. :-)

Kent Lew

For what it’s worth, in metal days the octothorpe-style number sign would not have been supplied as part of a standard font of type. And it would not have been style-specific. It would have been available to order from among various miscellaneous “typographic accessories”.

Here’s a quick snapshot from a Barnhardt Brothers & Spindler catalog (n.d., ca. 1925).

John Savard

Claudio Piccinini said:

Here’s how it’s designed in Miller (also vertically slanted) but not sure it’s appropriate for the “robust and eccentric” De Vinne. :-)

The design in Miller is highly problematic. It looks too much like another very similar character, which which the number sign should not be confused - a musical sharp.

Kent Lew said:

For what it’s worth, in metal days the octothorpe-style number sign would not have been supplied as part of a standard font of type. And it would not have been style-specific. It would have been available to order from among various miscellaneous “typographic accessories”.

That is indeed true. However, the general practice these days is that all the characters within a digital font are harmonized with the typeface of which the font is an implementation. This practice has a precedent with the IBM Selectric Composer:

In the metal type days, both % and @ would be typographical accessories, while & would have been part of the font. But here, % and @ are made in the same style as the other characters on the typing element.

Kent Lew

My point in providing the BB&S example was that trying to evaluate stylistic compatibility for such characters by seeking historical precedent is something of a red herring. Such auxiliary characters weren’t viewed in this way until roughly the early 20th century. And even then, it was only in the context of the most popular styles. The rest were served by generic “accessories”.

So the “appropriateness” of any given # design for a historical revival of DeVinne is going to be highly subjective.

Johannes Neumeier

Kent Lew said:

So the “appropriateness” of any given # design for a historical revival of DeVinne is going to be highly subjective.

What's more, self-imposing some canonical design restriction for such glyphs that are devoid of a clear established convention is just robbing yourself of some design fun. It is also a great test for your understanding of the typeface design, e.g. designing a floral heart follows fairly little convention, and a lot of applied design synthesis.

Proofing with numerals has been mentioned, but don't underestimate the use as #hashtags. Even if you're not designing a font that will be used in a social media context per se, there is still a very good chance someone is going to typeset a hashtag with it.

Craig Eliason

John Savard said:

The design in Miller is highly problematic. It looks too much like another very similar character, which which the number sign should not be confused - a musical sharp.

I’m all for disambiguation as a virtue in general, but I’m finding it hard to imagine a context in which this confusion would arise and rise to the level of “highly problematic.”

John Hudson

I don’t think this is a question of disambiguation but rather simply that Miller has the wrong form for the number sign. That is a musical sharp sign.

Craig Eliason

Interesting that the ATF 1923 catalogue only offers this quite diagonal, contrasty version

and the big Linotype catalogue from the 1930s offers two versions

Kent Lew

John Hudson said:

That is a musical sharp sign.

I’ll grant you that it has the pronounced contrast pattern of a musical sharp sign. But the proportions are not really those of a proper sharp, given how little room there is to adequately mark a staff line. Though, obviously it would communicate just fine in textual setting. Which brings us back to Craig’s point.