Sun, snow and a night in jail

Don't hyphenate st, because it hurts them. That´s a rule of thumb we learned in primary school and in German it rhymes. About combining the two letters however, we learned relatively little. Some designers seem to show off their typography skills or at least their interest by doing so. Whether or not using the st ligature is appropriate or even pretty—who knows? When we proposed our storybox logo, we got criticised for using the ligature just for the style. However, we decided after due consideration that it supports the idea of the brand and offers an added aesthetic value. Looking at the logo of Lucerne Festival though, I don't understand what the aesthetic value is here.

The logo caught my eye because in my opinion the ligature is used very inappropriately here. The logo is set in Quadraat bold and uses only uppercase letters. I only know of lowercase ligatures though, so what I see here is some sort of hybrid glyph. The two uppercase R and N were probably merged to get a smoother flow. I just wonder why in the middle of the word they combined the uppercase S with a lowercase t by drawing a very strange looking ring above it. Not least since the rule is not to use ligatures across syllables and festival is hyphenated fes|ti|val in German as well as in English. Is it all about the style in the end?



But Lucerners are special anyway. I learnt that last weekend, when I took a closer look at the idyllic little town. While Zurich is rather a busy place, in Lucerne you can find the slow Swiss stereotype. Amazing how different the culture is an hour further into the country. From Lucerne it´s also easy enough to get to Engelberg, a small snow sports resort in the middle of the alps. So Matt (who was visiting) and I could enjoy sun and snow at the same time and even spend a night in prison. But have a look at the photos.

In addition: The thing about the ligature wouldn't be that unusual if it wasn't designed by the noone less than Meta Design. They explain it as a "perfect analogy to the legato ties in musical notation". Well, I don't know ... this wasn't exactly what crossed my mind when I first saw it. But perhaps I'm just not the target audience.

The whole thing can be read here.