First used as ornamentation by calligraphers and stone cutters and later included within moveable types to avoid crashing letter pairs, ligatures have always elicited a fascination amongst typographers and designers alike. As if performing a typographical magic trick, they seamlessly combine surprise, utility and recognizability into a single character.

Our fascination with ligatures however hasn't always been a perfect friendship. Actually finding and using ligatures outside of the traditional ‘fi’ and ‘fl’ combinations has often proved difficult. Confusing key combinations or waiting for the perfect word (Aha!, ‘junction’ has the ‘ct’ ligature!) can sometimes seem like more struggle than it’s worth.

Keeping these considerations in mind, the nearly 200 ligatures for Lingua were built around the most common letter pairs within the English language. Once thought mundane letter combinations like ‘th’ and ‘an’ can now be used alongside their more traditional counterparts. As a result, the normally reductive geometric forms of Lingua without ligatures can be turned into a nearly upright script with the ligatures turned on.

Since Lingua is an OpenType font all of the ligatures and special features are contained within a single cross platform file. All ligatures outside of ‘fi’ and ‘fl’ are designed as Discretionary Ligatures allowing the user to turn them on or off or select them individually through the Insert Glyphs palette within InDesign or other OpenType savvy applications.