Kobayashi says the updated font will “work well for products and brands with a clean and open image. In a previous interview with Linotype, Frutiger said on the origins of Avenir that he “felt an obligation to design a linear sans in the tradition of Erbar and Futura, but to also make use of the experience and stylistic developments of the 20th Century”. It was always about finding the sweet spot that makes the proportions, weight, and texture as close as possible, without overriding any unwritten rule that would make the Hebrew look unnatural, or ‘Latinised’.” On the contrary, geometry suggested that letters like Men and Tet become especially wide. This is why in some cases the geometry was overridden by subtle humanistic touch, for example in Zayin, and Gimel. Yanek Iontef, who led development on the Hebrew character set, says that “a Hebrew geometric model that is as classic as Avenir simply doesn’t exist. Start to finish, the project took the Monotype Studio a year to complete, working with international type designers Yanek Iontef, Nadine Chahine, Toshi Omagari, Akaki Razmadze, Elena Papassissa and Anuthin Wongsunkakon on each of the new scripts.
WHERE TO BUY AVENIR NEXT FONT UPDATE
The foundry set out on the update to enable users of the font to “reach many parts of the world and a broader audience,” he adds. Notwithstanding the standard styles extending from ultra light to overwhelming, this 32-text style assortment offers dense appearances that rival some other. “But our worldwide network of designers who are real experts in their local script helped us to accomplish this.” Due to Frutiger’s absence, “I felt my task as a supervisor of the expansion project was enormous,” he tells It’s Nice That. Frutiger passed away in 2015, so this time Kobayashi led the project. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, it was updated by Frutiger and Monotype’s creative type director Akira Kobayashi in 2002 to modernise it in line with demands in print and digital design.
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The Avenir Next World font family has been expanded to support over 150 global scripts and languages and now features Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Vietnamese, Georgian, Armenian, and Thai, plus ten weights and two new styles, ExtraBold and Black. Monotype has updated Avenir, one of the most prevalently used fonts in the world, for the first time in 20 years.