A Type Tour #2

Here’s a b in Avenir.

How would construct that letter? Avenir is a geometric font so it’s quite simple: take a line and a circle, put them together.

This is pretty close to the Avenir b. If you look closer at the Avenir b though, you see some variation in stroke thickness of the bowl as it attaches to the spine: it gets slightly thinner.

Such subtle variation is what causes even closely related typefaces (say, just geometric sans-serifs) to look different and have a different feel at a distance or in a body of text. Moving on to other letters, there are a few that look very similar to b.

In fact, for a whole bunch of sans serifs, these are basically the same glyph flipped, rotated, and rotated and flipped.

Here are some sans serifs where the glyphs are exactly identical. In Helvetica, the bowl is oval rather than circular. Futura, which like Avenir, is a geometric sans-serif has circular bowls. And so does Century Gothic, another geometric typeface. Century Gothic also has a very large x-height so the ascenders and descenders are short, and the bowl looks huge. Myriad Pro, a humanist sans-serif, has slight curves at one end of the spine (the baseline end for d and b, and the meanline for q and p) but it’s still the same glyph across the four letters.

But there are sans-serifs that are not completely symmetrical. In Franklin Gothic, the stem of the b at the base line has a little notch and so does the q on its stem. These break the symmetry of the four letters. In the next sample, we have Garamond, an old-style serif. I don’t want to discuss serifs in this post but it illustrates where the inspiration for the notches in Franklin Gothic comes from: from serifs! Overpass, an open-source clone of Highway Gothic, has all the ascenders and descenders sliced at the end and the direction of slicing is always from bottom left to top right. Lastly, News Gothic is interesting in that the b, q, and p are regular, but the d has a slight curve at its stem.

And… that’s it for this type tour. See you on the next one!