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Fun fact: lowercase "f" has more kerning overrides than almost any letter in the alphabet, all because of one small design choice — a crossbar that extends past the stem. It looks elegant on its own, but next to letters like "i" or "l," it can visually collide. That's the entire reason "fi" and "fl" ligatures exist. Before they were built into digital fonts, printers cast them as single pieces of metal type, just to stop the crossbar from physically crashing into the next letter on the press.
The history goes even deeper. "f" shares an ancestor with "u," "v," and "w" — all descended from a single Phoenician letter representing a hook or peg. It also has a strange twin: the "long s" used in old printed texts, which looked so similar to "f" that modern readers often mistake it for a typo.
This glyph series is breaking down every letter like this — history, anatomy, and the design problems font makers actually lose sleep over. ✍️ #TypeDesign #Typography #FontDesign
Read more: https://letterhanna.com/why-lowercase-f-is-one-of-the-hardest-letters-to-kern-in-any-font/