Futura Ligatures Postcard

This is a story about how I designed and printed a postcard that illustrates typographic ligatures. I will mail you one.

Lisa and I were browsing the printmaking section of the Mount Allision University Library in Sackville a few months ago, and I came across a reproduction of Ligatures, by British artist Stephen Hoare:

Ligatures in typography are when two letters are combined into a single character so as to improve spacing. 

One frequent candidate for “ligaturing” is the lower-case f. For example, here’s the word “wifi,” in Futura Bold, on the left without a ligature, and on the right with “fi” as a ligature:

Longtime readers will know that I love ligatures: they are the Kaliningrad of typography, one I first became enamoured of in 2009 when I came across the book Typologia by Goudy in a Copenhagen library. I returned to the book in 2015, when I wrote about the discretionary ligatures in Goudy’s University of California Old Style.

Seeing Stephen Hoare’s work prompted me to want to take my own ligatures out for a ride: I acquired a font of Futura Bold from Letterpress Things in 2015, complete with ligatures for ff, fl, ft, and fi. I set about making a postcard that both used them and illustrated their function.

This was my first typesetting and printing job since I broke my elbow; until this week I wasn’t certain I could lift the chase into the press; turns out that I’ve regained enough strength and range of motion to do just that.

The design I settled on shows the non-ligatured version of each letter combination, their combination into ligatures, and words that include the ligatures:

Mail Me a Postcard

I’ll happily pop a postcard in the mail to any reader who would like one: just email me your postal mailing address, and I’ll send you one “naked” as a bona fide postcard.