Type & Hierarchy — Avenir
About the Project
We were each given a typeface that we were to research about and create a type specimen poster for. The poster will then display information about the typeface, such as the creator, the year of its creation, distinguishing features, and its characteristics, all while demonstrating the usage of scale, weight, linespacing, and indentation in effective typographic hierarchy. The typeface I worked with is Avenir.
About Avenir
Avenir was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988. Frutiger created this typeface after being inspired to take a humanistic twist on Paul Renner’s Futura typeface, which he thought was too disciplined and rigid on the page. Therefore, he named his font ‘Avenir’ because it means ‘future’ in French.
Though it is under the geometric classification, Avenir is not purely geometric. It is characterized by its “o” not being perfectly circular, its vertical strokes being thicker than the horizontal strokes, and shortened ascenders.
Some quotes about Avenir
“A time for fonts with a human touch”
“…nothing more or less than a clear and clean representation of modern typographical trends, giving the designer a typeface which is strictly modern and at the same time human”
Inspirations
I was inspired by these posters and the uses of the modern, hip colors. Because the typeface is used in posters and advertisements, I wanted to see which colors would complement it the best, and pastel or faded colors seemed to fit. I also examined how it uses different weights and styles of the typeface to accent the features of the letters.
Project Processes
Sketches
I sketched out some ideas of what my posters could look like. I focused on accenting the characters that make the typeface special and tried to concentrate on the sizes and placements of each component. I wanted the audience’s eyes to be drawn first to the word “Avenir”, so I made sure that I put enough weight on it. I played around with different ways of writing the word, but I wanted all of them to have a modern taste to it. Some of the letters that were interesting to me were the double-story uppercase “A”, flat top vertices with pointed bottom vertex of “N”, the tail of the uppercase “Q”, and the circular dot on the lowercase “i”. I tried to highlight these special characters of Avenir in my pieces.
Digital Iterations
I then created digital products for the sketches. When I made the first one, I saw that it was too plain, so I made the second one with a more modern twist. I combined the aspects of the first idea with its blocked letters and tried to create a more playful, movie-like poster. I added pastel colors to accent the modernness of the font and played around with rotations of the placements. However, I wasn’t fully satisfied with how it looked. I wasn’t sure what it was, but something was off. This is when my interim critique really helped.
It wasn’t the critiques I received, but it was looking at others’ works and finding what worked and what didn’t that helped my progress. I initially had a narrow scope on how I was going to fit the required information onto my poster, so my creativity was so limited. I had been trying too hard to include all the elements that define Avenir in one level, so it was lacking excitement and depth. Everything was too cluttered into one dimension and didn’t unify together to define Avenir succinctly. Therefore, I decided to take a more simplistic approach.
Therefore, I created the third digital iteration after my interim critiques, using more negative space and cleaner designs. I created more of a definition format, and after my instructor saw this, she recommended that I try a dictionary definition format in an artistic manner. Avenir means ‘future’ in French, and I felt that that was something to be accented as Avenir was derived from the typeface Futura. I also added the quote from Frutiger that described the typeface as “modern and at the same time human” as its definition because that is exactly what the typeface is. I added depth to the poster by underlaying the word ‘Avenir’ subtly in the background, highlighting the uppercase A, V and N’s heights, and the lowercase e, i and r’s roundness that define Avenir. So now, there was depth to the poster that gave hierarchy of information. I tweaked some colors and cleaned up the designs to create my final iteration.
This project helped me fully understand the importance of typographic hierarchy. There are many ways of presenting important information, but it’s crucial for me to first know what I want to highlight more than the others. Depending on that, the method I will use to express the hierarchy will be different. I found it very fascinating how depending on the typeface, the degree of simplicity differs. Avenir was a more modern and humanistic font, so having a cleaner, simplistic look seemed to be more effective in demonstrating the qualities of the typeface. I had a lot of fun working on this project, realizing the need to prioritize information without being greedy.
