A ligature, you say....?
According to the website I Love Typography, a ligature is “not simply two letters arbitrarily glued together. The two letters are crafted into a single letter (technically speaking a single glyph).”
Above, you’ll see an example of ligatures available via Linotype for Herman Zapf’s Zapfino typeface, but you can find some examples much closer to home with the new wordmark for Andrews University that was introduced in 2008. While it looks very much like what you may be used to seeing when you see the Andrews University with the flame/arch (we call that part of the wordmark the “flogo”), designers Mark Cook and Brian Edelfson of Thesis: created ligatures for the “A” and “n” in the word “Andrews” and between the “t” and “y” in “University” to help create a wordmark that is uniquely Andrews’ own.
Look at the yellow circles below to see the new ligatures in question (which, for type geeks among us, is a wordmark set in the Berkeley typeface):
Labels: design standards, IMC, typography