Study Task 3 & 4 - Kerning and Ligature

Kerning - the space inbetween letters which affects how you read. process of adjusting the spacing between the characters in a font to achieve a visually pleasing result. e.g letters with an overhang may need to be adjusted so they fit better without large gaps in words (e,g v) can use kerning to give you an interesting figure e.g FedEx negative space. 

Kerning can be used to signify certain qualities e.g very broad  “Cereal” minimalistic, sophisticated. 032c - seem quite ugly but played with deliberately to break those rules such as Balenciaga who uses dad clothes etc. 

Exploring Kerning and how it can signify the brand meaning: 

• Lifestyle brand - like cereal went spaced out kerning as it’s very sophisticated but not too spread out so that it’s still legible. 

• Condom packaging- signifies its qualities as functional. neutral so that it’s trustworthy. 

• Budget Supermarket - not great design the capital letters are on the same level and the ‘a’ twists at the end for a more friendly affect. just trying to attract people. not much of a brand identity. 

• High-end jewellers. equal kerning throughout. want it to be very legible and clean. professional. Tone of voice is serious like the brand and its quality. 

• Insurance company. more closer than high end jewellers as its serious as well and wants to be professional however the closer is more standard. 

Ligature - ampersand is an old connected letter or a ligature. It usually contains an e and t that aren’t usually recognisable.  Had roots in letters E and T from roman times and have now lost that legibility. 

  First idea was combining the letters of OMG to try create a symbol that was based on actual letters such as "&" . This symbol represents the exclamation of using OMG and I tried to keep it neutral so that it could be used in many contexts. The G is part of the O through cutting out the M shape. The pacman affect is gives is almost like an emoji yelling.

This was another idea but this time we approached it with the idea of conveying irony through texting as most ligatures are quite neutral. The dot conveys the irony whereas without it can be used seriously.










Wanted to take the idea of conveying meaning further but also focus on the idea of making it quick to type rather than write as OMG is more often used text based as it originated from text talk.








This was my final idea for a ligature to represent OMG as it's based on the accents grave and accents aigu in french as grave (pointing downwards) changes the accents of vowels to go lower and aigu creates a higher sound. I used the aigu (higher) to connote a more positive meaning therefore using omg positively whereas grave is used negatively. Translated to speech marks the speech mark facing the right way is aigu/positive whereas the flipped is grave/negative. This could also be used with / \ as a more obvious approach to the meaning and if there is no access to a flipped speech mark as that's not a direct command on a keyboard.