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Are all connected alphabets ligatures?
Or is it more complicated than that?
My Creative Monologue this time sends us to the realm of typographic ligatures. So, are any glyphs linked together in any way considered a ligature or not? Here’s what I found out.
Here’s a bit of a backstory: I held a little fun card-making workshop with my friends and decided to slip in a bit of a typography lesson along the way. I had to, considering one friend in the past already called me a “font freak.”
The topic was simple enough that an average person can wrap their heads around it. Instead of writing words on their cards normally, I told them to link certain letters together in different, special ways. For example, the ‘ae’ in maestro could be instead written as mæstro. I aimed to teach them this, and that is called a ligature.
Ligatures come in many different approaches. The font Infini by Sandrine Nugue showcases a lot of various “links” you can do with alphabets, such as putting a small ‘i’ in an ‘O’, or letting an ‘E’ sit atop an ‘L’. One even fuses three alphabets by merging the strokes of ‘E’, ’N’, and ‘T’ to form one glyph. It’s a really fun way to stylise texts, and many recently marketed fonts have these offerings to beautify wordmarks or headlines.
