That's A Nice Looking Font: Avenir

I’ve been working on an ad/flyer for a client and I always like to try out some different fonts for headlines. Avenir was one of the first fonts I ever purchased years ago and I hadn’t looked at it for a long time, but I’ve decided to use it because I think it looks really clean and simple – very appealing to me and hopefully for the client’s audience. Here’s an example:

I decided to have a look into (i.e. googled) Avenir to see who created it and this is what I found;
The font was created by Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger in 1988. It was influenced by the Futura font.

From the myfont website;

The word Avenir means “future” in French and hints that the typeface owes some of its interpretation to Futura. But unlike Futura , Avenir is not purely geometric; it has vertical strokes that are thicker than the horizontals, an “o” that is not a perfect circle, and shortened ascenders. These nuances aid in legibility and give Avenir a harmonious and sensible appearance for both texts and headlines.

Frutiger also designed Univers – a set of capitals and numbers specifically for white-on-dark-blue backgrounds in poor light for the French metro and Frutiger – which was designed for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris (to name a small few).

I only occasionally buy fonts, mostly because I have so many on my computer and I tend to use the same ones over and over, but I admire typographers and their dedication. It is a real craft to put together an entire typeface with consideration for tracking, kerning, x-height, ascenders and all the other lingo involved with type.

Do you like the Avenir font or have you used it in your designs?

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11 Cool Dingbats For Your Design Bag

Below you’ll find a list of 10 dingbats with links to where you can download them. These are, of course personal choice of what’s cool – some of them I like because they’re a little bit retro, some because they’re cute (but not cutesy) and some because they just unusual. The great thing about using dingbats for design work is that you can easily create paths from them and use them in Photoshop or Illustrator as vectors or you could convert them to brushes or symbols. Each font has it’s own usage policy so make sure you check it out.

Invaders From Space

Noah’s Ark

B.O.M.B. (Best of Magurno Brushes)

Lego System

Steeltongs

All My Hands

Barcode

Orna4

20 Faces

Butterflips

Eller

15 Free Retro Fonts

ret·ro [ réttrō ]
adjective

Definition:
Modeled on something from past: modeled on something from the past such as a style of fashion or music.

Smashing magazine recently had a nice review of websites designed in a retro style. Below you’ll find examples of 15 retro fonts I’ve got in my own font bag that you might be interested in for your web or graphic design projects, along with links to the websites you can dowload the fonts from.

Fontdiner is a terrific site with free and paid for fonts available.

Girls Who Wear Glasses have a large number of free fonts available, here’s a few of their retro styles that I liked.

Fontoville have some lovely paid for Retro fonts but also generously give away these:

Typographica host the Hitchcock font by Matt Terich as an homage to the iconic lettering by Saul Bass.

Rotodesign also offer some free retro fonts to download.