The Ventures – Flights of Fantasy album art
Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Apr 27th, 2019. Artwork published in
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3 Comments on “The Ventures – Flights of Fantasy album art”
The Schelter & Giesecke ad uses both forms of s for the lines in Edelgotiſch*, but does without the long s for the smaller text in Romanisch. This is in line with the style-specific preferences at the time, see my comment to the post about the Julius Hager ads.
*) The typesetter got one of the s’s wrong. Can you spot it?
How about that ‘ch’ ligature — is this a special addition for this specific typeface, or was it a common feature at the time of that advertisement? I have never seen it in recent typefaces (apart from elegant ‘ch’ discretionary ligatures for serif type)
At the time, ligatures for the ch and ck digraphs were commonly included in German typefaces, together with such for tz and various ones involving f and ſ (long s). In German, ch and ck represent single sounds. Having single sorts was handy for speeding up manual composition, too – apart from loanwords, the letter c rarely occurs in other combinations.
While the ligatures were mandatory in blackletter, one can find them in many roman faces, too, including sans serifs. They don’t always have such a fancy, almost symmetrical form as in Edelgotisch. In later releases like Palatino, the letters don’t touch, but are rather fitted pairs.
The use of ch/ck ligatures slowly fell out of fashion after the Second World War. This was further accelerated by the demise of metal type. You can still find tightly kerned pairs in the early digitization of Univers, though. Traditionalists might appreciate this as a language-sensitive feature, while younger designers will dismiss it as unbalanced spacing.