Project 3: Type & Hierarchy
This project was about researching the history and design of a particular font. For this project I researched Avenir.
From my research I learned:
- Adrian Frutiger designed the Avenir typeface.
- Avenir was designed in 1988 and is thus one of the newer fonts that we are exploring as a class.
- One identifiable features of Avenir, a sans-serif font family is that the o’s are not perfectly circular.
- Avenir is used in Apple Maps and some screens of Siri, as well as catalogs for Best Buy.
- Many different logos are adaptations of Avenir, such as with custom kerning.
Other features are highlighted when we compare Avenir to Futura, a geometric font that is a tad more geometric than Avenir.
- Avenir’s x-height and aperture are bigger
- V-shaped letters, such as A, M, N, V, W, are pointed in Futura but squared in Avenir.
- Avenir is a more organic version of the geometric style, which is why letters such as the “o” are not geometrically perfect.
For my thumbnails I had two main ideas: I wanted to convey the sense of “future” that Avenir brings, as the word avenir is French for “future”. The phrase I chose was “The future is Avenir” because I thought that it represented that Avenir was very futuristic, especially for its time when it was first designed in 1988. I decided to make the phrase travel in a line at an angle upwards because I wanted it to represent time travel or light travel, something that moves very fast and is sci-fi genre and therefore very futuristic.
My other design focuses on the organic aspects of Avenir, and I tried to paint a natural-looking scene. I created elements of nature from the Avenir typeface and I chose the phrase “rolling with Avenir” because I wanted to make the font seem a bit more carefree than the other strict geometric fonts like Futura or Helvetica.
Another design focuses on Avenir’s French aspect. Although Adrian Frutiger is Swiss, the name of the font itself is French. I created an Eiffel Tower out of Avenir words to represent this. However, before creating digital iterations, I felt that the connection between Avenir and France was simply not strong enough, so I decided not to continue with this ideation.
I created two digital iterations to start. Main changes I made since the thumbnail drawings were that for the iteration with “the future is Avenir”, I made the background darker and the text light-colored to emphasize that Avenir is illuminating the future of font design. For the organic iteration, I made sure to add perfect circle wireframes to a large “O” that represented a wheel. This would emphasize that the “O” for Avenir is irregular and is not perfectly circular.
For the next iterations, I decided to iterate more on the organic design. I felt like the gradient in the light text of the future design made it seem more like a throwback to the 1990’s rather than a glimpse of the future, and I didn’t really see a vision of how to improve that design. I decided to try to stick with just the organic-based design.
After the interim crit, I received feedback on how to improve my design. In the final iteration, the focus was brought to the bicycle and the large hill. The wheel by itself seemed to lack meaning, so I turned it into a bicycle to represent a vehicle bringing Avenir to the world since 1988. The year 1988 went inside the basket of the bicycle, and the creator’s name is featured on the tires as futuristic LED lights. This together shows that the momentum of Avenir has carried on since Adrian Frutiger designed it in 1988. The hill became larger, and sections of the hill bound by regular Avenir type (Roman) were filled with warped type, to make the flow of the hill a bit more natural and dirt-like. I removed the stick that represented Adrian Frutiger’s name because it seemed out-of-place.
Through this project, I was able to notice and appreciate the subtle differences between different font families and learned how to convey a message about the font through the font’s weightings and intrinsic properties.
