Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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So how many ends should an asterisk have?
There are many questions to that answer. The most obvious and probably least desirable is 8. Why obvious? It's easy to draw. All you need to do is halve existing angles with additional lines. 8 seems to be the answer chosen by kids and other first-time asterisk drawers as well. Why not so desirable then? Well, you need four lines, which tend to look messy when the asterisk is supposed to be small. Also getting all four lines to go through the same vertex in the middle is quite tricky if you're in a rush.
So the answer should be 6 then, I guess. Getting used to the 60° angle isn't as hard and your asterisks will be finished after three simple strokes. For practical purposes when actually writing this really is be best solution...
... if, however, you're in the lucky position of not having to write by hand but use computers instead, then you'll want to go for a five-ended asterisk. That one's almost impossible to draw both neatly and at reasonable speed manually but of course readily available in many typefaces. But it simply looks best of all.
This would be the place to tell off the people at asterisk.com, I guess. Or, more subtlely, those at Wallpaper who have a nice asterisk for their logo but seem to use a font with a six-ended asterisk for the text on their site – hence spoiling the experience.
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