Q boils down to 2 components: the O, and the diagonal/ squiggle/ swash/ magnifying glass handle/ tail/ chingadero. Component 1 has limited options, but the options for component 2 are infinite.

It’s amazing how you can put nearly anything in the bottom right, and have no trouble reading the Q.

Depending on how expressive the rest of the alphabet is, you can try some fun solutions.

In English, the Q is almost always followed by a u, so you might think, “Well I can just make that tail as long as I want! After all, it’s insanely long in Trajan!”

But Trajan was designed without a lowercase, so there was no risk of the tail colliding with a descender. For most designs, a modest Q can still be quite attractive and legible.

q belongs to the bdpq group, and the agbdpq group in italic.

In serif land, the q usually has nothing on the top right, and a normal serif at the descender.

Somewhere along the line, we must have been taught to make out qs like this. Maybe elementary school?

While it’s a quaint form, it probably does more to distract and mess with spacing than aid legibility. So mind your ps and qs, and keep ’em boring. ✌