03.

Heidi Neilson in Typography of the Period (from 2003) has, in fact, magnified periods from twenty-six different typefaces, “blowing up” each of these atoms of punctuation by 3,000 per cent in order to examine their shapes more closely. Among the samples studied by Neilson, only the periods from typefaces like Avenir, Gill Sans, Palatino, and Times New Roman look like perfect circles, whereas the periods from typefaces like Arial, Helvetica, Lithos, and Verdana look like squarish polygons.² The diverse designs for these silhouettes of edgy daubs and oval blots might seem surprising, given the presumable simplicity of the shape for such punctuation — and yet the reader encounters a plethora of forms, not unlike spores of pollen. Her project reminds me of “microdots” used by spies to convey stolen covert documents, miniaturized to the size of a period.