My love of letters came to me much later in life, as I’ve expressed in other posts. As a toddler, when I first saw the Roman Alphabet, I did not think the letters were beautiful. I played with a Fisher Price chalkboard and set of magnetic letters, Helvetica style. The thick straight lines, unbalanced asymmetries struck me as ugly and lacking the magic of languages like Chinese. When I finally began to love the alphabet, it was because I was drawing so much and occasionally, in my search for beauty, even making up letters of my own. I learned from my personal explorations that letters have patterns and that there is a balance in letters between individualism and conformity. If letters are too dissimilar, they do not work together beautifully. And if letters are too similar, they are too easily confused with one another and their identities blur. I began to respect rules as a source of beauty and harmony, through my explorations with letters.
