In his autobiography, Frutiger explains that this was a response to the effects of how people perceive colour. The original release of Avenir has weights grouped very close together, with the difference barely distinguishable. The typeface family was later expanded to six weights, each with a roman and an oblique version. I'm proud that I was able to create Avenir.' Īvenir was originally released in 1988 with three weights, each with a roman and an oblique version, and used Frutiger's two-digit weight and width convention for names: 45 (book), 46 (book oblique), 55 (text weight), 56 (text weight oblique), (75)85 (heavy), and (76円 (heavy oblique). And what's crucial is that I developed the typeface alone, in peace and quiet – no drafting assistants, no-one was there.

Working on it, I always had human nature in mind. (.) It was the hardest typeface I have worked on in my life. įrutiger described Avenir as his finest work: 'The quality of the draftsmanship – rather than the intellectual idea behind it – is my masterpiece. Frutiger intended Avenir to be a more organic interpretation of the geometric style, more even in colour and suitable for extended text, with details recalling more traditional typefaces such as the two-storey 'a' and 't' with a curl at the bottom, and letters such as the 'o' that are not exact, perfect circles but optically corrected. As the name suggests, the family takes inspiration from the geometric style of sans-serif typeface developed in the 1920s that took the circle as a basis, such as Erbar and Futura. Avenir is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1987 and released in 1988 by Linotype GmbH.

Avenir next condensed regular font free