Embroidery & Typography

Catherine Elizabeth

This is my latest embroidery, for Catherine Elizabeth May who was born just less than two weeks ago.

The font is Bickham Script Pro, and one of the things I liked about it (along with most of the fonts that I buy) is that it has proper ligatures. A ligature replaces a sequence of single characters with a single conjoined character, as shown in the example below:

Ligatures

(Quick typography fact – the most commonly used ligature is the ampersand, where et becomes &.)

What I didn’t notice until I was almost at the end of the embroidery, is that there are two th ligatures in “Catherine Elizabeth”, and they’re both different! In “Catherine”, the t is a single stroke, joining to the h from the crossbar. The upper loop of the h is also very wide, extending over the top of the following letter e. However at the end of “Elizabeth”, the t joins to the h from the bottom stroke, and the crossbar doesn’t join at all. The loop of the h is also much narrower.

I’m afraid that I’m not going to unpick an entire night’s worth of embroidery in order to make the two ligatures the same. What I am going to do is fiddle around in Photoshop, and try to work out why it decided to render the two ligatures differently.

0 thoughts on “Embroidery & Typography”

  1. Catherine says its lovely as it is – don’t unpick it. The difference in the ligatures is not something as simple as one h being in the middle of the word and one being at the end? The ligature in catherine overhangs the next letter but the lack of a ‘next letter’ after the th in elizabeth would necessitate a narrower loop to stop the letter looking too top heavy maybe… I know only a little about calligraphy and its much less scientific than typography but if I was writing it, I’d be looking for a single straight line from the bottom of the h to the outside of the curve for the loop.

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