Study Task 1 - Punctuation, Ligatures and Emojis

Brief: 

Design and develop a new character for a typeface of your choice. This new character should be designed as a response to a pre - identified problem. Explore the use of negative space, silhouettes, angles and shape. Explore the use of abstract and representational forms. 

A ligature is a glyph created when commonly used characters fuse together. A prime example of this is the ampersand (&), created from the letters 'e' and 't' to form the word 'et', which means 'and' in Latin. It first presented itself in 79AD graffiti from a wall that had been preserved in Pompeii and has become an integral part of Fortnum & Masons visual identity.

We paired up for this exercise and my partner and I brainstormed some ideas. 

Commonly used words/ phrases        
- I don't know
- maybe
- yes/no
- what/where/when/how etc.
- with
- because
- something


Common letter combinations
- th
- st
- ough
- ation
- ss

Difficult to spell words
- definitely
- receipt (and all words with the i before e rule)
- apparently

We started with the combination of 'ough'. We thought this would be a good start as many word have this combination and some are long to write out so could save time. I sketched some initial symbols/ligatures incorporating the letters together. I think they turned out quite well but not necessarily shorter to write than the actual letters so we moved on to the next idea.

Moving onto the word something I tried a combination of the letters s and t but the ligature looked too obvious for my liking. I like the concept of combining the 's' and question marks together, I think the symbol can be applied to every day life quite easily. Also a favourite is the italic combination of the 's' and 't'.

For because I liked the bottom symbol as the letters fit together easily however the symbol will not be shorter/easier to write than the actual word.

The words 'yes' and 'no' can be easily represented by a tick and a cross respectively, but 'maybe' has no shorter way of being said. To solve this problem we decided to base our ligature/symbol on the word.

I started with the actual letters of the word 'maybe' and combined and manipulated these. My favourites are the 4th symbol on the top row which combines the 'm' and a question mark to represent the meaning of the word. 

I moved on to something less obvious, playing on the meaning of the word and using 'y' and 'n' to create a ligature.

When we researched maybe we found that in Latin, the the word 'fortasse' is used. By condensing this down we were left with the main letters 'f' 't' and 's'.


 
Taking the ligature into illustrator, we chose the font Baskerville as the typeface is crisp and clean and includes both serifs and ball terminals which are interesting to look at.

Altering only the 't' we extended the length of the crossbar so all letters were linked. Whilst extending the tail of the 't' to face both ways and adding a ball terminal looked interesting it seemed too complicated to use as an everyday symbol. We decided to take a simpler approach and break away from using strict letterforms.

our final ligature.

Our final ligature (above) combines the letters 'f', 't', and 's' as well as forming the letter 'm', which while being slightly more abstract, could clearly be used as a symbol in everyday life. The 'f' and 's' portions are made from the same stroke with the only seperation being the crossbar on the 'f', or first leg of the 'm'. The 't' is oblique rather than italic and contains a straight stroke of the same weight as the other letters.

From our group crit we gained valuable feedback. 

• Our symbol is easily applicable to formal situations, eg business letters or emails, as it uses serif types to hold a traditional element. 
• It is a far out idea but works well in comparison to original idea, it is well developed to a successful outcome.

It was suggested that our ligature could be improved if

• We experimented with curving the top line to mirror the curves of the f and the s 
• and it could also be successful in everyday life if the ligature was simplified down even more to perhaps just an m with a crossbar over the first leg. (useful for handwritten pieces of text/ shorthand)