Creating a Ligature

We began our project by looking at Latin symbols and their potential for ligatures (Fig.1.) We then looked at the Latin symbol for city, a triangle with 3 dashes within it.

 

Fig.1

I thought this had potential as by tilting the triangle we found it had direction, offering ‘do you want to go to the city’ as its meaning (Fig.2.) Similar to a 'play' button or arrow.

Fig.2

We then discussed adding the time of meeting next to it, to show how it would work within context. Additionally, we thought each dash could represent a mealtime (| breakfast, || lunch ||| dinner.) 

Yet, we moved on from this idea, as it did not resemble the original word ’city.’

I believe this was a mistake as although this was not yet a ligature, it had potential and plenty of visual meaning. Perhaps the 3 lines could have been bent into to curves to represent the C in city- (((. 

Instead we developed the phrases ‘cos’ (Fig.3) and ‘no way’ (Fig.4.) We found many ways of shortening and compressing these phrases into ligatures with added punctuation, including ! and ? (Fig.5.) This did become striking and obvious- however I think it lacked the symbolism and research that our original city ligature had. 

Fig.3

Fig.4

Fig.5

In future I think it would be best to avoid the obvious, even if it means making the design too vague- this can be refined later. Through the crit I also realised that the ligatures I would like to use myself, were not reconstructions of the original words, but were symbols with research and depth.