On Ligatures

What exactly does a typographer do? The short answer: they make reading feel invisible, like Matthew Carter did with Georgia in 1993, a typeface so legible you forget it was designed at all. That's typographic craft: shaping the interface between thought and eye.

My favorite ligature? The ampersand. That lovely &. It doesn't have a clean translation in Spanish or English, because it is a translation of the Latin word et, meaning and. Originally a shorthand used by scribes, it fused the letters e and t into a single glyph. In some fonts, this is obvious. In others, like Baskerville Italic, it’s a delicate dance, a flourish that feels half-calligraphy, half-puzzle.

Why spend time turning a conjunction into a tiny artwork? Before Gutenberg mechanized printing in 1440, every letter was handwritten. Speed mattered. Elegance mattered. Ligatures like &, or combinations like fi or fl, weren’t just ornamental; they saved time, saved space, and kept the flow of the pen unbroken. Form and function were inseparable.

Even now, in a world of keyboards and digital glyph sets, ligatures persist, not because we need them, but because we love them. They’re typographic vestigial organs, still functional, still beautiful. Most people don’t even notice them, but once you do, you start seeing them everywhere.

Take a look at the word “efficient.” See how the f and i nestle into each other, forming a single, clean stroke? That’s not a rendering glitch; it’s a deliberate ligature, built into typefaces like Lucida Grande by designers like Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It’s typography whispering: “I see you reading.”

We’re taught to write with clean spacing in kindergarten, letter by letter, block by block. But as soon as we relax, once speed starts to matter, we invent our own ligatures. We loop and link without thinking. It’s in our bones. It’s efficiency with style.

Maybe that’s the real point: ligatures don’t matter practically anymore, but they still matter aesthetically. They’re evidence that we once valued not just communication, but how it looked and felt, a lingering signal from a time when writing was a craft.

So yeah, honor the ligature, not because it’s useful, but because it’s beautiful, because it used to be useful, and we haven't forgotten.