Avenir Next®
By Linotype
This family is not only an update though; in fact it is the expansion of the original concept that takes the Avenir Next design to the next level. In addition to the standard styles ranging from ultralight to heavy, this 32-font collection offers condensed faces that rival any other sans on the market in on and off—screen readability at any size alongside heavy weights that would make excellent display faces in their own right and have the ability to pair well with so many contemporary serif body types. Overall, the family’s design is clean, straightforward and works brilliantly for blocks of copy and headlines alike.
Akira Kobayashi worked alongside Avenir’s esteemed creator Adrian Frutiger to bring Avenir Next Pro to life. It was Akira’s ability to bring his own finesse and ideas for expansion into the project while remaining true to Frutiger’s original intent, that makes this not just a modern typeface, but one ahead of its time.
Avenir Next Variables are font files which are featuring two axis, weight and width. They have a preset instance from UltraLight to Heavy and Condensed to Roman width.
The preset instances are: Condensed UltraLight, Condensed UltraLight Italic, Condensed Thin, Condensed Thin Italic, Condensed Light, Condensed Light Italic, Condensed, Condensed Italic, Condensed Demi, Condensed Demi Italic, Condensed Medium, Condensed Medium Italic, Condensed Bold, Condensed Bold Italic, Condensed Heavy, Condensed Heavy Italic, UltraLight, UltraLight Italic, Thin, Thin Italic, Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Demi, Demi Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Heavy, Heavy Italic.
Adrian Frutiger was destined for typographical greatness well before his entrance into the world of commercial typeface production. Very creative from an early age, Frutiger dabbled in sculpture and type design, in particular, alternatives to the stiff, formal cursive taught at his native Swiss schools.
Arguably, Frutiger’s most famous font, the Univers® family, was produced as a reaction to Paul Renner’s 1927 Futura® typeface. Frutiger did not feel comfortable with the manner in which Futura sat upon the page, feeling it was too disciplined. Preferring a more humanist approach to typeface creation, he persuaded his then-employer Charles Peignot to allow him to create a new face based on different criteria.
Various other fonts followed after the Univers creation including Serifa®, Glypha® and the self titled Frutiger®.
The Avenir (French for “future”) font was produced as another real alternative to the Futura design and the original face was available in three weights with accompanying italic variants. This limited variety led to the reworking of the type in the early twenty-first century by Frutiger and Kobayashi. The Avenir Next design was subsequently released in twenty-four different styles including Regular, Italic, Condensed and Condensed Italic variants and published by Linotype in 2004. Legible and eminently flexible, designers the world over have embraced the Avenir Next face for a wide variety of different projects.
Since its release, the Avenir Next design has been immensely popular for an extensive range of different applications. The font was instantly successful in print and with its expanded range of characters and specific optimization, equally successful as an on-screen font. Many companies have adopted the font for use in official literature as well as logotype.
LG currently use the Avenir Next design on cell phone buttons because of its excellent readability – something very important in everyday use and emergency situations. The British television channel BBC2 recently shifted its corporate typeface from the Gill Sans® font to the Avenir Next font, breaking away from the typographic image formerly used by all BBC channels.