OUGD403 - Study Task 02 - Ligatures

This task was to design and develop a new character for a typeface of our choice, and should be designed as a response to a pre-identified problem.

In order to decide what our ligature would be used for, we looked into common abbreviations used by ourselves and others in text speech, and decided to focus on 'because' or 'cos' and 'no way'.

Fig. 1. Quick initial idea sketches.

Our initial idea was to create a ligature for these words which would symbolise the shape and form of their original letterforms. For example, using the combination of all letters in the abbreviations, starting with 'cos'. As you can see in Fig. 2, some basic elements of each original letterform remain, such as the C, S and the O, some parts being the whole and others being created out of the negative space of the joining of other letterforms.

Fig. 2. Ligatures for the abbreviation 'cos'.

However, we felt that these were far too obvious and held on too much to the original letterforms. So instead, we started to focus on creating a ligature for the phrase 'no way'.
Again, we began by looking at the original letterforms within this phrase, but this time using these more as a starting point and only focusing on the main letters such as N and W to represent the first letters of each word. Some variations also included elements of the letter Y and an exclamation point to represent the way in which the phrase would be spoken.

Fig. 3. Initial ideas for 'no way' ligature.

After feedback from a group crit, we realised that we had still been too obvious and that to improve, the ligature should look slightly more abstract and that we should perhaps emphasise the letter O a bit more. Another piece of feedback was to experiment with deconstructing the letterforms to be more simplistic, as this ligature would also possibly have to be utilised in everyday handwriting.

Therefore, as developments from this crit we looked more into how the phrase would be spoken and realised that it could be used as both a statement and question, so decided to incorporate this into our design. We did this through the use of curved lines and the deconstruction of the exclamation point to symbolise pitch of voice and to distinguish between the use of the phrase as a question and as a statement, as shown in Fig. 4.

If we were ever to take this task further or re-design our ligature, it was discussed that more research should have been done into the history of the words, phrases and abbreviations themselves as to create more depth and meaning of the ligature rather than just a simpler version of the actual word.

Fig. 4. Final designs for ligature.