A Short Meditation on the Letter ‘g’

This has been rattling around my head for some time – it’s probably best if it were let loose. It’s just a short meditation, so please bear with me.

Here it is. The letter ‘g’, lower case, Times New Roman. There are other typefaces – lots of them. There are other letters – at least twenty-five. But this one stands out.

It’s a gangly thing, asymmetric and abstract. And yet the skill that went into this character … it should be ugly, yet somehow it isn’t. It is elegant and refined with the reflective self-similarity one might find in a poem. The talent of the typographer is extraordinary.

And I remind you that there are lots of letters and lots of typefaces.

So we fling these graceful little sigils around like confetti – each individual character could barely be worth less.
 
Yet our lanuae falls apart without them.
 
Consider that this shape was once applied as a mixture of soot and oil to battered, compressed wood pulp. This shape has been converted to a set of rules so that any computer can display it as an artfully rendered matrix of pixels.
 
This character represents a sound.
 
On sight of this character, we can recreate that sound inside our heads without a murmur.
 
Along with its buddies, that character conveys meaning. It can convey to me the thoughts of a person who died a century ago. That mark can impart to me the knowledge acquired by a lifetime’s genius and that genius itself augmented by those selfsame characters.
 
It’s like magic.

At Little Fire, we have an eye for the small details; we value them. In the words of the pastor Charles Swindoll:

“The difference between something good and something great is attention to detail.”

If you want a great website, start with people for whom the little things matter.