Alphabet 26

Thompson developed in 1958 a font called Alphabet 26 or a "monoalphabet," an alphabet whose uppercase and lowercase forms of each letter were identical, and case was expressed through letter size only. (In the conventional Latin alphabet, it is already the case for letters like "o" and "O" or "s" and "S" but not for a/A, r/R, etc.) His monoalphabet was a transitional serif (modelled after Baskerville) with lowercase a, e, m, and n mixed with uppercase B, D, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, P, Q, R, T, U, and Y. (The forms of C/c, O/o, S/s, V/v, W/w, X/x and Z/z are essentially the same in uppercase and lowercase letters to begin with). The simplification was intended to make the letters of the alphabet more logical and intuitive, making the alphabet easier to learn and use. Thompson first published the alphabet in a Westvaco Inspirations for Printers.

The set of letters for Alphabet 26 thus appears:

a B c D e F G H I J K L m n o P Q R s T U v w x Y z

The above example uses the CSS rule font-variant-caps: unicase, which is not supported by many browsers as of July 2017. A closer approximation that works in most current browsers (but suffers from slight variations in weight & height) is the following:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Example: BRaDBURY THomPson DesIGneD aLPHaBeT 26. (Alternate approximation: Bradbury Thompson designed alphabet 26.)