What symbol do you use to represent ‘and’ when writing? This was the premise for a Masters Thesis at London College of Communication. Handwriting allows us to explore short cuts for expressing frequently used words like ‘and’. An in depth look at the history of the ampersand and ‘et’ symbols lead to a series of questions about how these symbols are used today. A survey was created and conducted to understand what people use today to represent ‘and’ in writing. After an analysis of the survey responses, three new digital typographic characters were created based on the most frequently written ‘and’ symbols.