.png)
That dot above lowercase “i” has a name: it’s called a tittle. And it’s a lot younger than most people assume. For most of classical history, “i” was just a plain vertical stroke, used for centuries with no dot at all.
The dot shows up as a medieval fix, not a design flourish. As scribes started writing tighter cursive scripts, sequences like “minim” turned into dense clusters of nearly identical vertical strokes — “i,” “m,” “n,” and “u” all built from similar straight lines were getting genuinely hard to tell apart. Scribes started marking certain “i” strokes to separate them visually, and that mark eventually standardized into the round dot we use today.
There’s a deeper twist too: “i” and “j” were essentially the same letter for a huge stretch of history, with “j” only splitting off as an independent character much later.
This glyph series breaks down every letter like this — history, anatomy, and the practical fixes behind details we never think twice about. ✍️ #TypeDesign #Typography #FontDesign
Read more: https://letterhanna.com/letter-i-designs/