Avenir: Typeface Specimen Poster Project
About the Project
For one week, our communication design fundamentals class focused on the importance of type and hierarchy, and, ultimately, created a poster about a randomly given typeface. The typeface I was given was Avenir. The goal of this project was to elicit the power of typographical signals for clarity and immediacy. Our class took numerous steps before reaching our final drafts.
Sketch Poster Ideas
Our project process began with hand-drawn, sketch poster ideas. Avenir is french for “the future”, and so I wanted to portray a futuristic look for my poster on Avenir. This is reflected in my attempt in italicizing “Avenir” in order to give the title a sense of movement. Furthermore, I placed space between letters in “Future” because it seemed to make the word seem more geometric. The shades represented spotlights that I thought I would use as background.
Digital Iterations
This poster is a close replication of my hand-drawn, sketch poster idea. Overall, the black and white contrast gives the poster a simple, yet eye-catching design. All the components on the poster are geometric: the circle is uniform, the types of Avenir are becoming heavier in order, the title is centered. In addition, I attempted to make the title have a anaglyphic 3D effect by placing blue and red images on each side of “Avenir”. However, after having mini critiques from my classmates, the 3D effect seemed hard to see against the black background.
Keeping in line with my idea to portray a geometric poster, I focused most of my content on the center, and then placed my paragraphs on Avenir on each side of the center. Overall, this gave the poster a clean, symmetric look, but I believed seperating the paragraphs would not be a good design consideration. The reason is, as the viewer’s eye travels around the page, he or she would have to skip from one end of the poster to the other. Hence, I edited my digital iteration.
The above poster is close to my final draft, but slightly behind. The blue outlined words was inspired from “Tron” and gave the poster a more futuristic look. The main change in this digital iteration, however, was placing a white line at the 66% mark of the poster. This technique is called “the rule of thirds”. From this, I was able to achieve a balanced looking poster, while simultaneously letting the viewer’s eye travel around the page efficiently. The blue, yellow, and gray color scheme of the poster worked out for the most part, but it was hard to see the blue outlined structures against the gray background.
Final Poster
After all the critiques I received from my teachers and classmates, I created the above digital iteration, which is my final draft for Project Three. The capital A’s at the background are symmetrically flipped and aligned to remind the audience of Avenir’s geometric composition. Certain words in the paragraph are highlighted by yellow because they are important dictions to Avenir’s history. “Adrian Frutiger”, “19888”, and the typographic examples are placed at the bottom of the poster because they seem to have more weight, in contrast to the smaller, less weighed words above them. I believe the poster has enough components to share the important information on Avenir, yet has enough space to be pleasing to the viewer’s eye. After all, the main purpose of a poster is to be informative to the public in an effective way, and I believe my poster achieved that.
