by Maryam Hosseinnia

Was it a design decision or simply an accident to have a dot above the lower case “i”?

Well, this morning, Mauaro Zennaro shared with us his historical point of view on this particular question in the part two of the history of typography lecture.

At the end of the middle ages, the Romans needed to establish new schools to teach not only religion but also philosophy, medicine and law. To do this, they needed lots of books and many educated people to copy texts.

It was common for monks to take on this task since they knew how to read and write. The monks had to follow the same guidelines for writing the text on the page. With these principles, a new kind of writing was developed. A regular, unified and consistent form of typography was introduced that no longer looked like script writing and was easy to copy for production.

In the end, the dot over the small letter “i” was invented to differentiate the lower case “i” from an lower case “l”. Otherwise it was ImpossIble to read books.