æ is a distinct letter in quite a few languages, so the design tends to be quite conservative. You might find it difficult to come up with ‘uncommon variations’.

Where there is some interesting variation in approach is in italic types, but this is due to the practical difficulty of distinguishing æ from œ in styles with a unicameral a.

Hi Gustav,

follow the links in the Wiki: aesc – this character has been discussed before.

Florian

You may find useful the tips Frode Frank gave me about æ details here.

This combination is called a dipthong. Other combination are sometimes are logos or cliches. Germans use ch and ck.

You can also look at Uli's pdf referred to in this thread on ae: http://typophile.com/node/68510#comment-402458

This is the kind of question that the Advanced Search filters at MyFonts are great for … for instance, here are all the fonts with the æ character that have been tagged as "serif": http://bit.ly/9dge25

Nick, that's pretty awesome! now if only i could isolate one character and get a grid...

Robert: This combination is called a dipthong. [sic]

A diphthong is a phonetic phenomenon: a glide between two vowel sounds within the same syllable. The æ character represents a diphthong in some languages, but in others it represent a pure vowel sound.

Great. Thanks everyone for the information.

Gustav

>This is the kind of question that the Advanced Search filters at MyFonts are great for...

>Nick, that's pretty awesome!

Awesome indeed, but why do different versions of Franklin Gothic keep gatecrashing the list? I thought that was a sans serif.

Paul: A gridded sample view (to complement the existing "list" and "gallery" views) was on my long list of things to do at MyFonts that I didn't get around to before taking my leave. Suggesting it on their feedback page might help move it up in priority.

Nick: How far down on the list are you seeing Franklin? If you see a tag applied incorrectly to a font, you can always "disagree" with it on the font's page, which will improve your future searches as well as those of other users. That's part of any folksonomy I suppose… there will always be some stray errors but they're publicly correctable, and the openness allows the overall system to be much more comprehensive.

You can always contact me offline if you have any questions about æ or anything else I might now something about (including pipe smoking, Premier League 96/97 and were to find a decent kebab in Norway).