What began as an exercise of the mind ideating 100 hand-drawn ligatures, culminated into a selection of 3 ligatures to push further for the class assignment. It was difficult to decide on JUST 3 ligature designs, as I was fond of about 20. But I settled on ligatures made from 2 lowercase H’s, an M and a N, and 2 lowercase G’s. I felt as though they had enough to differentiate from one another, as well as have some versatility in different potential applications.

Once it came time for the next part, I used Illustrator to create digital copies of the designs with the Pen tool, and proceeded to apply the designs at various angles and zoom on the 9-grid template. I did get a little bit confused around this area with what could and couldn’t be done with the designs, but it got cleared up in the end. Once I had 3 sets of 9 for each design, I started filling in the outlines of them in different ways to get black & white versions of each. These would be used as a guide for the inking process.

Before getting to the inking process, I had a terrible time at this point in the project. Having to transfer the designs to Bristol Pad was an ordeal, and honestly made me very disillusioned with working analog. There is a level of respect for sure to the old processes, however in another timeline, had this been the norm, I would simply pursue another career path. This part also played a significant role in holding up my progress/submission time on this.

Once it came time to ink, it was difficult adjusting/having the brush effectively do what I wanted it to do. I am an awful painter, and although this wasn’t exactly painting, and more akin to calligraphy, the overall idea felt the same and I could not get edges to look as clean/accurate as I had hoped. As I used it more, i did pick up a rhythm and made less of a mess, however the results were still lackluster by my standards. What I ended up with just seemed like an awful representation of my work.

My final takeaway from the whole project is that ligatures are a very cool way to potentially create a logo, or simply to design in an atypical way. It was also fun exploring the key differences in typefaces and exploring how those differences could create something new. My other courses also have me looking at the anatomy of a typeface and a little bit of the history, so I liked the overlap and want to believe it helped me in this project. Unfortunately, the more analogous work that came with this project really killed the fun for me. Of course, this isn’t always going to be fun work, but truthfully it did make me start reconsidering some things. All that said, it was a cool experience and I am happy to have gained new skills/design tools for the future.