Type Specimen Poster — Avenir
Avenir, a font created by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, can be described as “an organic interpretation of the geometric style.”
The typeface got its name from the word “future,” being that Avenir is the french translation. It is a sans-serif geometric typeface, inspired by classics of the style such as Futura (1927) and Erbar (1922). Although it is considered to be geometric, Frutiger wanted Avenir to have a more organic feel to be more humanized than it’s processors. The great thing about Avenir is it’s versatility. It can be used for headlines and display type, or it makes a perfectly fine body type.
The project goal is to create a poster for a given typeface that communicates it well. The poster must include the typeface name, the designer, the year it was designed, body text describing the font (I use both an excerpt from a book and a quote for description), and a character set. It can have additional elements but only if they are made up of characters in the typeface.
First impressions of the typeface on a poster
I included the tagline “An organic interpretation of the geometric style” as a subtitle because I wanted it to be the central theme for my poster. The quote above the descriptive body copy is by Adrian Frutiger, speaking about his thoughts as he created the typeface and the intent behind its creation. These two elements (the quote and the body copy) are of equal importance in my eyes, so they are the same weight, style, and size. My issue that I deal with as the project goes in is in scale — I don’t want any one piece to overwhelm the others, so it takes me a long time to find the right size for things such as the name of my font.
My first drafts involved placing the elements of my poster on the page. At this stage, I was not concerned with color, depth, or any finer detail. I just wanted to get a feel for how my elements would look on the page together. The good thing about Avenir is that it’s meant to be an accessible type for both titles and body texts, so I could rely on its innate readability as I began to explore other options for my poster.
Early Explorations — Scale, Spot Color, Extra Content
One of the first parts of the poster that I began to do more with was the title. I played with opacity and weight to create a title that looked like it was moving into frame. This motion was meant to be indicative of Avenir 1) as an update to Futura, and 2) as its name suggests, a place in time, the “future”. I also played with putting a light blue into the poster to see how that could emphasize certain aspects of the content including the title as well as the character set and subtitle.
I also styled the year and designer together because I felt that they were inseparable at this point in time. I stylized them to look…trendy, I guess. In later versions, I explore other options, but here I feel like it fits well on the drafts of the poster that I have.
I added extra characters, highlighted in the spot color, so that I could point out certain things about the typeface that make it unique and readable. I play with scale a little bit more, increasing the size of the title, including a large character set, and moving around and emphasizing or deemphasizing “Adrian Frutiger ‘88”.
It is important to note that I have a 6-column grid at this time, and I adhere to it very closely. This project involved a lot of learning on my part, in terms of how to break the grid in a way that wasn’t too abrasive but allowed some freedom for the content.
Breaking the Grid
These posters were my next three. I purposely arranged the letters in the title so that they were readable yet seemingly random. I wanted them to look like they were thrown on the page haphazardly to lean into the “organic” side of Avenir. The body copy, the subtitle and designer-year pair all lie on the grid still, while the descriptive captions are equally spaced from their respective letters. I switched from using random letters to using the letteres in the title to illustrate the details of Avenir. This made the captions more purposeful and the poster less cluttered.
The color came about as I was playing with new background colors. The light blue and beige look old-timey, and so a fellow designer said that maybe it would look the opposite if the colors were the opposite. This doesn’t often work, but for this poster the colors seemed to fit a soft futuristic time period. This is not the harsh blue, red, black and white of Star Wars, this is the blue and orange that could be seen in faux-futuristic amusement park rides.
This was the poster that I brought to our intermediate, full-class critique. The character set in the top-right and the designer, year, and subtitle in the bottom-left are meant to set a frame for the rest of the content in this poster.
The critique that I got for this poster mostly involved the title, saying that the letters were contrastive but not contrastive enough. Some of my peers said that the letters weren’t large enough and that the letters appeared to be floating. They also said that they didn’t know where there eyes were supposed to travel. The poster “tells” the viewer to read the title, then the text in the bottom-left, and then it’s up to you to figure out where you’re going to go. You never land on the captions describing details of the font and you don’t go to the body text because it’s separate. I was also told that the colors weren’t exactly right yet, although they were close.
At this point, I decided on doing a few things: I would increase the size of the title to constrain everything a little bit so it didn’t feel like everything was floating. If that didn’t help the flow of the poster, or if it didn’t make the pieces less float-y, then I would rearrange the title and then all of the pieces after that. Lastly, I would play with the color to try and make the poster FEEL like Avenir.
Taking the Crit to Heart — Larger Title and Better Flow
I increased the size of the lettering and aligned the letters to a grid (albeit a very soft alignment). While I don’t think these changes worked for the poster, one change did. I used the emphasis color (the peachy orange) to emphasize the words “organic” and “geometric” in the subtitle to connect them more to “Avenir”. This grounded me as I changed the arrangement of the character set and the arrangement, size, and content connected to the title. I was also encouraged to find alignment in different pieces of my poster, and so that guided me as well.
I began to ditch the random arrangement of the title, now leaning into the geometric side of Avenir. In my last iteration above, I ditched the captions completely, as the details are explained in the body copy and on display in the typeface all over the poster. I also made the entire title lowercase because the geometric pattern of the title made it unnecessary to have an uppercase that cut the unity in the letters. The layout of the title also helps the readability of the title because it is laid out in syllables as opposed to a random order.
This was the layout that I ended up developing for the final composition. There is horizontal alignment in the first syllable and the subtitle and designer. There is horizontal alignment in the second syllable and the body copy. There is vertical alignment between many of the pieces. From here, the poster is composed of tweaks to this layout.
The Beginning of the End — Emphasis with Color and Size
These iterations involved a couple changes. I was finding different weights for “avenir” and “ ’88 ” so that the year was not as prominent as the name of the title. While there were subtle changes to increase the contrast of these two in later iterations, the title stayed medium while the year stayed light. I wanted this to take on that “trendy” look that I originally tried to go for with the designer and the year in the first few drafts.
I also increased the distance between the subtitle and the designer, and I tracked the body copy a little bit wider. At this point, I was told that the character set, if it were even more indicative of two solid white lines, would ground the poster and the rounded bottoms of the 8’s.
These drafts were my first explorations into new colors. I ended up staying with my same color scheme in this exploration, but it was nice to see that high contrast colors (especially the bright colors on the black background) didn’t suit Avenir very well. In my later exploration into color, I used more balanced color palettes.
Last Explorations Before Deciding on the Style and Layout
This theme was a detour from that of my other compositions. While this doesn’t embody the straightforwardness of Frutiger’s “organic interpretation of the geometric style,” it was visually interesting. I think that for another poster this detail and theme could work, but it didn’t end up making sense for this poster. For the rest of my drafts (except for one more using this style), I adhered to the clear and simple vision that Adrian Frutiger had for Avenir.
These are my last tries at different layouts before I realized that the layout I use for my final was best. These involve cramming information in the bottom, leaving awkward negative space at the top. While I like that the year in this still stands out while not being too prominent, the bottom-heavy theme was too much, and my subtitle didn’t need to stand out more.
Final Color Exploration
For my final color exploration, I was directed to view fragmento universo and Linn Fritz for inspiration. I also took a bit of inspiration from the Tour de France design, shown in the first color palette (white, yellow, black). The above pictures inspired the color palettes and iterations below. The monochromatic themes are indicative of Avenir and the feeling that I want to evoke in the viewer via my poster.
I used photoshop to quickly but uncleanly implement some of the color schemes into my poster. For the ones I liked, I then developed them more cleanly and more diversely in inDesign.
The style and size of the ’88, the body copy, and the subtitle and designer changed. The latter two elements also got bottom aligned to the syllable in “avenir” that they’re next to.
This color choice was made to represent the time that Avenir was made. It sets the context of the time period that Adrian Frutiger thought that Futura needed to be updated. If I had a choice, I would put this up right next to a copy of the color scheme of my final product to juxtapose 1988 and the future that Frutiger was thinking of for Avenir.
Final Poster
Here’s an explanation of each part, in order of intended reading order:
- The title is prominent because of its unique color, its size, and the way it sets the grid for the poster. It’s split into its syllables to be easily readable, reflecting the typeface in any form that it exists in (as text or as headline).
- The year sets the stage for the viewer to understand the decisions that were made for the typeface and the time in which they came to fruition. It is the same color as the body text, and less weight and size than the title so as to deemphasize it. It’s almost as important as the name of the typeface, but not quite.
- The subtitle and the designer are aligned to the first syllable of “avenir” and are given room to breathe so that they stand out from rest of the content. “Organic” and “geometric” are the only other part of this poster that is the same color as the name of the typeface. They are meant to be connected despite their distance because Avenir is meant to be understood as both (as the subtitle tells you explicitly). They also lie on the grid to give the poster an even more geometric feel, as well as to make the poster more readable.
- The body text is bottom-aligned to the second syllable of Avenir. It sticks up a little bit into the negative space surrounding the subtitle, but it doesn’t interrupt the reading. It is meant to given the least emphasis because it is meant to be read towards the end. Also the quote and the description serve as a good summary for the experience because the viewer has already experienced the typeface by seeing almost the rest of the poster.
- The character set is the last thing to be read, giving the viewer a final, concrete, and pure encounter with Avenir before leaving the viewing experience. From far away, it’s meant to be understood as two lines grounding the content of the poster. Only when the viewer has gotten closer should the character set be the character set, leaving its lasting, organic-yet-geometric impression on the viewer.
