Mini studio brief: Ligatures

Figure 1

Figure 3

Figure 2

Ligature is two or more letterforms joined together to create one symbol.

To aid my initial ideas I started with some basic research into existing ligature such as the ampersand which is derived from the latin translation for and-“et”. This then lead me to the idea to create a ligature for thank you by joining both the T of thank and the Y you together to for the ligature in figure 1. In order to create this final ligature I first experimented by sketching initial ideas and looking at how much of each letter you can remove in order to create a ligature whilst keeping it relevant to the message trying to be portrayed (see figure 2). I then decided to refine my more successful response digital to create a more clean cut sleek ligature as seen in our final design (see figure1). During this design process I also experiment by looking at the latin word/symbol for thank you and develop some ligature from this. Initially I sketch some ideas by looking at different ways to alter existing letterforms (see figure 3) which I developed further using illustrator in order to simplify and refine my initial sketches more to create the final outcomes shown in figure 1.

After receiving feedback I have found that the TY designs featured in figure 1 where more successful as they where more easily recognisable and would fit within the english language more successfully than the more abstract designs feature in figure 1 which are more complex and harder to understand. However the abstract designs in figure 1 where found to be more interesting, therefore they could be refined so they are more easily understood/recognised which would also allow the ligature to be transferred into different fonts for universal use more easily. In future I plan to do more research to form my initial ideas in order to be able to develop my ideas more easily whilst doing more experimentation as I feel I should off experimented with putting my ligature into different fonts/context to identify problems with my designs.