Study Task 01 - Punctuation, Ligatures & Emojis

To begin our thought process me and Jasmine created a mind map (see above image) of common greetings/ farewells that you would usually use both in person and over text. We decided on ‘goodnight’ as we thought this would be a useful ligature if you were too tired to reply to a text but didn’t want the other person to think you were ignoring them, you could press one button and they would know you were going to sleep.  

As the image above shows, we originally developed our ideas from the letters g and n in an italic style of handwriting. The reason I used this curly font was to represent the nature of the word ‘goodnight’ it is a word that is floaty and usually gentle on the ears therefore I wanted to capture this in the way it appears on the page.

After doing some research into other ways to say goodnight we realised ‘night’ is a much more common phrase. We then created some ideas using the letters n and t (see image above), these were much easier letters to work with as they sat together easily when working digitally but were also much easier to write by hand.  

After working with both combinations of letters (see image above) we decided that the ‘nt’ ligatures worked better as the ‘gn’ looked a lot like a logo rather than a ligature.

Here you can see ‘nt’ in different fonts (see image above) as we tested the see if a serif or sans serif font worked best. We decided on a serif font as it relates back to the floaty nature of the word goodnight.

We then needed to put the ligature in context amongst other letters as we tested other fonts (see image above). We wanted to make sure the x height of the ligature was the same as the other letters in the font as well as the n sitting on the baseline and the t being level with the other descenders. We chose Garamond for our final design as we liked the width of the ligature in this typeface as it is a little bit wider and not as long as the others.

Displayed above is our final outcome with it featuring in a sentence so that people had a better chance of guessing what it was in our crit.

After feedback from the crit and listening to how other people approached the same task I realise now that more research into the word goodnight would’ve been beneficial. People who created interesting ligatures that stood out had done loads of research and instead of using the actual word they had used origins of the word.