Looks cool! The fi and fl are maybe a bit too far apart.

si is mad I love it Forgive me as I've been a stranger to these parts for quite a while. what typeface does it go with?

1) Between the Regular and Bold the two rows are very different in stroke contrast.
2) Looking at the overall, this seems like a font for smallish text, which makes the thins in the top row of the Regular too thin I think.

hhp

I like these.

I also agree with 1996Type:

"The fi and fl are maybe a bit too far apart."

Maybe that's what you're seeing in fj and ff too?

Have you gone and designed the ligatures before the type or am I missing something, I do like them though

Actually it's hard to tell whether some ligatures are too wide or others too narrow when we can't see the rest of the alphabet and its spacing.

thank you for all your comments. I ve been busy working in some other stuff. Ill post some images very soon. Hope this will give you a bigger picture of the typeface. Thankyou

by the way, anybody ever designed a ligature for fï ?

by the way, anybody ever designed a ligature for fï ?

See this, and the following posts:
http://typophile.com/node/40338#comment-248872

I've designed an fi ligature, at least if FontStruct.com fonts count...
As for ligature spacing, it depends on the spacing in a non-ligature letter pair. If the two letters do not touch, then that ligature is probably only good for artistic purposes (not necessarily a bad thing) and not for legibility.
One idea about ligatures I had (although I have never seen it anywhere) is an fi ligature where the dot of the i is on the outside of the f's hook instead of on the inside. Then there could be more spacing without widening the f too much, but I don't know how well it would work in practice.
Finally, you should keep in mind that if writers and typesetters are concerned about spacing, they will probably avoid ligatures altogether. So small increases in spacing are probably not a big problem.

Actually, ligatures -even when they don't avert a collision-
could actually serve to improve readability, by diverging boumas.

> the dot of the i is on the outside of the f's hook

Interesting idea. Could work for [very] small x-heights.

hhp

Re Boumas, I think I could refute that (without citations for now). If Bouma goes on wordshape, I would expect familiarity to be a key component. How would diverging from the familiar assist in shape recognition?

You just have to do it very methodically, using ligatures to
diverge words with similar boumas. It's like you're gaining new
letters of the alphabet that can nonetheless be easily recognized.

hhp

I think we may have a disconnect. Perhaps we attach different meanings to the same words. My understanding is that diverge means to separate. How does one diverge into similar? I would expect two different things to converge in order to arrive at similar.

Take "quest" and "guest": if you consistently ligate the "st" in
one but not the other, you've beneficially diverged their boumas.

hhp

It is my understanding that Bouma is about familiar word shape. Diverging from the familiar works against this theory. Yes, in your previous example the two words would be easier to differentiate, but in a singular instance, an st ligature would harm the bouma due to a lack of familiarity (I’m sure we can all agree that more often than not, people don’t use st ligatures). The only way your example would hold true in a bouma context would be if in all instances, one of the two words was traditionally set with a ligature, and the other was not. I do not mean in a single book, I mean in all books, for hundreds of years.

"The shot heard round the World"

But familiarity is learned. Exactly how [fast] I don't pretend to know, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't require nearly as much exposure as you imply. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to learn to read new words so easily.

hhp

An RSVP task at ~72 points using words with and without ligatures would be a fun study. I’d wager handsomely there would be no significant difference. I’ve actually had colleagues look at 72 point Times next to 72 point Helvetica and not notice a difference. As typographers we have an ridiculous response bias that we often take for granted. Similarly, if no one even noticed the presence of ligatures in a reading task, it raises the question “why bother fussing around setting them, let alone designing them?”

(How long did it take you to notice? Show this to a to a stranger at the pub and give them as much time as you like. They’ll never find it ;)

RSVP is too unnatural to be a reliable tool.

> I’ve actually had colleagues look at 72 point Times
> next to 72 point Helvetica and not notice a difference.
> ....

That logic leads straight to "Why do we need more fonts?"
Not to mention "Why am I participating in Tyopohile?"

hhp