PS...I know, that straight line in Galliard's small a is not exactly uniform width, it is slightly narrower at the upper right part etc, but at 12 or 14 point that detail is hard to tell and few notice it.

Some S's that I have made throughout my career. The S is my favorite letter. Some are fonts and others are lettering jobs. :)

When I was practicing Spencerian years ago I made the long s. Not sure if that is the same thing you are talking about.

Sounds like a normal long s to me.

My favourite glyph to make is the asterisk, and it's got to be five-pointed.

Charles, wow, I'm surprised anyone likes the S! For me I spend about ten times the amount of time on the s then I have to on any other glyph.

.

@Ryan Maelhorn:
For me I spend about ten times the amount of time on the s then I have to on any other glyph.

Then Donald Knuth's experience in the design of Computer Modern is not atypical.

Then Donald Knuth's experience in the design of Computer Modern is not atypical.

Seems there would be no better place to find that out than here.

What does everyone else say? Is the S the hardest latin glyph?

S, yes. As for favorites, I like the i no dot the most. Vertical bar next. Then the back slash... Period and comma next... Then the stuff you can combine from that. Then the stuff you get to flip, so its two for one. Then then stuff you can just cut and paste from other stuff, all the way the down to... the S, no... the s is harder, less room. But the S is more filling, so it could be a toss up.;)

Gazimough, from the zingauloonian carbon script. Impossible to render with technology available in this sector.

@5star:
5ive.

Hmm. Inspired by this famous painting, were you?

http://www.wisdomportal.com/Christmas/Figure5InGold.html

Binocular, Hrant, seriously?

I hate all letters. they're all so damn devilish. What's to like about ay of them?

R is OK, and being the initial letter of my first name may or may not be coincidental.

Binocular implies equal size. Two, or double, story seems descriptive enough.

I spend so much time with letters, that I am a bit jaded. So I have chosen ð (lowercase eth) as my favorite.

I don’t really think of letters in terms of favorites, but there are certain Greek and Cyrillic characters which I often find remarkably difficult to draw, and not because I am a native Latin user.

I suspect it is because with Greek the letters are very “scripty”, and don’t adapt well to more rigid typographic conventions that stem from the Latin typographic tradition. With Cyrillic, it’s the other way around.

I wonder if native Cyrillic and Greek type designers have a similar experience.

BTW, you can be native in more than one script.

hhp

'Two story' seems to be the term most people know, if they know any at all. From a pragmatical pov I vote we keep 'two story.'

Although I participated in this thread at the time, I did not try to name a favorite letter of my own. I use all 26 of the letters of the Latin alphabet to communicate with, and I just don't relate to them in a way that inspires me to single any one of them out.

However, just recently, I learned of a lonely orphan letter that needs a little help.

On my website, I have a page about various typewriter keyboard arrangements. Recently, I learned of the existence on the web of copies of a book I thought only existed in a lost manuscript. It was a Russian-language book from 1913.

And, thus, of course, it was in the old orthography, the new orthography only being decreed in 1918. This led to my becoming curious about how the change in orthography affected the Russian typewriter keyboard, and hence I made an addition to the page referenced above.

Even before this, I had run across claims that one of the letters eliminated from Russian, Ѣ or ѣ, "yat", was not actually identical in pronounciation to the letter currently used for it, at least in some dialects of Russian, and indeed distinguished words distinct in meaning.

So I think that I will adopt "yat" as my favorite letter, at least at the moment.

... a sound like the Arabic ح (which I'm not sure how to properly describe)...

Voiceless pharyngeal fricative, a sound produced by constricting the flow of air with the base of the tongue at the back of the throat.

such a technical term as "voiceless pharyngeal fricative" fails to have meaning to me

Or most anybody else. Thinking about how it's vocalized (and hoping that nobody reading is about to have a meal...) I would say it sounds like the beginning of gradually trying to clear phlegm from your throat. :-/

it may be hard to decide what the new letter for Armenian "should" look like.

Mashtots's shoes are certainly very hard to fill... The academic in question simply wanted it to look like the Thorn. I wasn't thrilled by that, but he was firm on it.

Had Armenian been written with the Cyrillic script

Which, in contrast to their success with the Azeris, the Soviets had the sense not to attempt with us!

BTW your П derivation escapes me.

hhp

My favorite letter is the one from Ed McMahon.

@hrant:
BTW your П derivation escapes me.

It was perhaps to trivial for you to notice. Since the Hebrew letter "Heth" was supposed to have this sound, a Latinized version of the shape would look like the Russian letter P, if we use the relationship between Shin and the Russian letter Sh as our guide.

@russellm:
Why, the very idea of a favorite letter is antithetical to a type designer.

No, no. The very idea of a favorite letter is antithetical to the craft of type design, and therefore the very idea of a favorite letter should be anathema to a type designer.

If we're going to toss around big words here, let's do it right, people.

uch a technical term as "voiceless pharyngeal fricative" fails to have meaning to me

That is why I provided the simple description of how the sound is produced: 'a sound produced by constricting the flow of air with the base of the tongue at the back of the throat'.

The only way to accurately describe vocalisation is to describe how sounds are produced. The technical name is simply a shorthand for such description. Trying to describe what the sound sounds like isn't helpful, because different people will have a different sense of what is meant by e.g. 'it sounds like the beginning of gradually trying to clear phlegm from your throat'. So one needs to talk about the parts of the vocal system and what is happening to produce a given sound, which can then be reproduced by anyone with a (physiologically normal) vocal system, even if the sound isn't part of his or her language. So, in this case, concentrate on moving the back of the tongue towards the back of the throat to constrict the flow of air, then pick a vowel and try to make a sound. :)