Sometimes, the simplest things can be the most complicated.

One would expect that X is constructed from two intersecting diagonals.

But if that’s our only move, a bold X begins to look fugly very quickly.

Call it “cheating,” “trickery,” “black magic,” or “the dark arts of the graphic arts.” The point is we have to do some interesting moves to balance the sizes of the top/ bottom and left/ right negative spaces.

In high contrast designs, the main diagonal might need a continuous through-line, but in that case we can offset the other diagonals.

Whenever drawing really bold slab shapes, I just draw the serifs first, and worry about how they’ll all connect later. This is especially helpful on X.

Lucky for us, lowercase x is just a scaled-down version of the capital.

The translation x can have top right and bottom left terminals that relate to the r and s, etc.

This is also true for expansion, but the italic expansion x can take one of the coolest forms out there, and remain perfectly legible. ✌