Times Insider

Three historic banner headlines on New York Times front pages contained an unusual typographic feature: a set of joined letters known as a ligature.

Jan. 21, 2021

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I-M-P-E-A-C-H-E-D.

The banner headline on the Jan. 14 front page summed up President Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment in just nine letters.

Or was it eight?

Some readers may have spied an unusual letterform in the historic headline: an “E” and “A” joined at the baseline and combined into a single character, known as a ligature.

Ligatures are used to improve the appearance and letterspacing of characters that would otherwise awkwardly pair. But the advantages of joined letters are not purely cosmetic. More evenly spaced letters can improve the readability of text, especially in a single word printed large.

The “EA” ligature dates back to December 2019, when the House was preparing to vote on the first impeachment of Mr. Trump. The Times, too, was drawing up its own coverage, including a big, bold headline for the top of Page One: “TRUMP IMPEACHED.”

But there was a modest typographical speed bump. Tom Bodkin, the chief creative officer of The Times, who is responsible for the design of the front page, and Wayne Kamidoi, an art director, were wrestling with an awkward gap in the middle of “IMPEACHED.”

“The first three characters and the last three characters set up naturally pretty tightly. The middle three characters, just by the nature of their forms, set up loosely,” Mr. Bodkin said.

Even as the stem of the “A” slopes away from the “E,” the long bar of the “E” prevents the two characters from coming closer. This leaves a noticeable gap between the letters, even as the rest of the word is tightly spaced.

“It looks like two words because of the space between the ‘E’ and the ‘A.’ That’s not good for legibility, and it’s not attractive,” Mr. Bodkin said. “We needed to overlap those two characters in some form.”

So Mr. Bodkin turned to Jason Fujikuni, an art director on the brand identity team, to draw the new combined character.

“I just thought it would live that one day, but it was fun to see it for a couple other big pages,” Mr. Fujikuni said.

Indeed, the ligature had a life beyond Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. It appeared in a November banner headline, “BIDEN BEATS TRUMP,” to announce the results of the presidential election. And, of course, it ran once more when Mr. Trump was impeached for the second time.

Andrew Sondern is an art director for print.