Built from parts: how Last Christmas is put together
Hundreds of letters in Last Christmas were never drawn as whole letters. They are assembled from 40 plain letters and 38 swash parts, like a construction kit.
Open Last Christmas in a font editor and you find something odd: hundreds of its letters contain no drawing of their own. They are put together from parts, the way you would build something from a construction kit.
A box of parts
The kit has two kinds of pieces. There are 40 base letters: plain capitals and lowercase without any flourish. And there are 38 swash parts: loops, tails, hooks and waves that do nothing on their own.
How a letter is assembled
Every swash part has a small invisible point that says where it attaches. The base letters have matching points: at the top of a stem, at the end of a stroke, at the bottom of a bowl. Put a swash on a base letter and it snaps into place.
The same part turns up again and again, turned or mirrored to fit. The curl over the T above is a part turned upside down; the loop over the A is the same kind of part tilted by about 22 degrees. The busiest swash is used in 74 different letters. Two parts are used exactly once.
One letter, many outfits
Because the parts combine freely, one base letter can wear many different swashes. Each combination is a separate alternate you can choose in the font.
Not every combination works, of course. The options were laid out as sheets of possibilities, and every alternate in the font was picked by eye, letter by letter. A few rules held throughout: no stem is left with a bare top, and the strokes that hold a letter together are never flipped; only the decorative ones are.
The sparkle
The small star above the i and j is a part too, and the same one in both letters. If the star changes, every i and j in the font changes with it.
Why build a font this way
Partly for consistency: a loop that appears in 74 letters is exactly the same loop every time. And partly because of the weights. Last Christmas is drawn in five versions, from Thin to Black, and a part only has to be corrected once in each of them for every letter that uses it to follow.
It also makes the font easy to grow. A new alternate is often a new combination of parts that already exist.
Last ChristmasFont · Script →Questions
Can I see the parts when I use the font?
No. In the fonts you install, every letter works as one finished shape. The parts only exist in the design file.
Why not draw every letter separately?
Consistency and time. A loop that appears in 74 letters is the same loop in all of them, and it only has to be drawn, and corrected, once.
