Project 3, Part 1: Preliminary Research & Poster Sketches
Typeface: Avenir
Designer: Adrian Frutiger
Year: 1988
Adrian Frutiger designed Avenir (meaning “future” in French) in 1988, after years of having an interest in sans serif typefaces. His goal was to design a linear sans in the tradition of Erbar and Futura, but to add a humanist element more relevant to the twentieth century. Unlike Futura, Avenir is not purely geometric; it has vertical strokes that are thicker than the horizontals, an “o” that is not a perfect circle, and shortened ascenders. Frutiger described the typeface as his “finest work.” (fonts.com)
“Working on it, I always had human nature in mind.”
My initial ideas for posters tried to center around what I felt were the most compelling and personal favorite aspects of the font — I was very excited to get Avenir, as it’s the kind of font that I actually find pretty exciting: less of a household name, yet still pervasive, and with a modern look. I wanted to emphasize both the futurism of Avenir as well as how it differed from more geomtric typefaces like Futura through its imperfections and humanism. In effect, I wanted my Avenir posters to look current, fashionable, and sleek.
I tried multiple approaches to get to this look, some of which were more successful than others. I was drawn to using lowercase letters over capitals, as it felt more “human”, while I toyed with different approaches to alignment. In one sketch, I put everything at slanted angles, while in the other, I went for a more horizontal, newsprint-styled look. I quickly realized that I was running out of ways to do something new with the tools I had, and so I tried a horizontal orientation. Here I tried to be as experimental as possible, using a giant “A” as a base to which I aligned everything else, or patterning giant “AVENIR”s like tessellations atop which blocks of text were overlaid.
I showed these sketches to a peer in order to get some feedback, and they were personally most drawn to the two posters at the very top; they felt that the middle right poster felt plain and unimaginative, while the horizontal posters were cluttered and might not translate well with the actual dimensions of the font. They also gave me advice to play with aligning text perpendicular to the baselines of other text, rather than just in parallel. This ended up being useful to me as I digitized my posters.
Ultimately, I (loosely speaking) chose the top left and middle left posters to adapt. The top left was one that everyone seemed to agree had a solid foundation and would turn out well, while I was still interested in the giant-A experiment of the middle left design and wanted to see if I could actually make it work the way I wanted to. I shifted to vertical dimensions upon finding out that the A was too narrow to fit a landscape canvas, and trying to fill the remaining space resulted in the double-A formation that ended up on my first digital draft.