The original Avenir typeface was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, after years of having an interest in sans serif typefaces. 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. In 2012, Akira Kobayashi worked alongside Avenir’s esteemed creator Adrian Frutiger to bring Avenir Next to life, as a new take on the classic Avenir. The goal of the project was to take a beautifully designed sans and update it so that its technical standards surpass the status quo, leaving us with a truly superior sans family. Since then, Monotype expanded the typeface to accommodate more languages. Akira’s deep familiarity with existing iterations of the Frutiger designs, along with his understanding of the design philosophy of the man himself, made him uniquely suited to lead the creation of different language fonts. Avenir Next World family, the most recent release from Monotype, is an expansive family of fonts that offers support for more than 150 languages and scripts that include Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian and Thai. Avenir Next World contains 10 weights, from UltraLight to ExtraBlack.

The popular Geogrotesque family becomes an extended system with the inclusion of three new members to the family; Geogrotesque Condensed, Geogrotesque Compressed and Geogrotesque Extra Compressed. The condensed series keep the spirit of the original one, and give way to a superfamily up to 56 styles. This new system fluidly varies between widths, ranging from the original width to a 55% of it in the narrower one. As their original partner, the new fonts are great headline families for publications, but will also work in text of intermediate length and point size. The Geogrotesque superfamily offers now one font for each design need. It is available in Open Type format and includes Ligatures, Tabular Figures, Fractions, Numerators, Denominators, Superiors and Inferiors. All of them with support for Central and Eastern European languages. This type family consists of 42 styles, 7 weights plus italics in 3 widths. For more details see the PDF.

The Bitstream version of Trump Mediaeval of Linotype, 1954-60, by Georg Trump, a prolific German type designer. It seems to be his best typeface. It has a vigorous and assumed oldstyle roman and italic that is the sloped roman, except for the letters a, e, f. With its crisp angularity and wedge-shapes serifs, Trump Mediaeval appears carved in stone. It is a strong text typeface that is highly legible and especially useful for low-resolution output. It is useful in display work too. Cyrillic version developed for ParaType by Vladimir Yefimov and Isabella Chaeva and released in 2010. Cyrillic italics maintain the main feature of Trump Mediaeval to be the sloped roman, except for the letters г, д, и, й, n, т. There are old style figures, additional ligatures and fractions available at all styles and small caps at the Roman 55. Black style was added in 2011 by Vladimir Yefimov.

Tina is another powerful script designed in the style of the classic forties and fifties American advertising fonts.

Ironwood is an Adobe Originals typeface designed by Joy Redick in 1990. Ironwood font is a homage to the old woodtypes made popular by the wanted posters in Western films. Adrian Frutiger designed his typeface Westside with the same idea in mind. Ironwood font is reminiscent of the Wild West and its shoot-out heroes, and its robust figures are particularly good for headlines.

Ergo is a relatively new font oriented on the form philosophy of Univers and Frutiger, namely, that a font which the eye should see as correct cannot be constructed. The eye tends to enlarge horizontals and to perceive verticals as weaker, and the stroke differences of Ergo are therefore designed to accommodate this tendency. Ergo makes a dynamic and modern impression and is extremely legible.

Old Town No. 536 is a homage to the old woodtypes. These became especially popular through their use on wanted posters in Wild West films. Adrian Frutiger also designed his typeface Westside in this style. Due to its robust figures, Old Town No. 536 is particularly effective when used in headlines. It belongs stylistically to the Italienne typefaces, whose serifs are thicker than the strokes.

The Seol Sans design offers a fresh palette for designers working with the Korean alphabet, particularly those looking to pair Latin and Korean alphabet (or Hangul) forms without creating typographic friction. The choices for Hangul fonts that work well with humanist Latin typefaces are limited. As Monotype’s first original Korean design, the Seol Sans typeface is a humanist take on the traditional rigid and hard designs of Hangul characters. The Seol Sans design more closely resembles the natural curve of hand-written characters. Seol Sans features Neue Frutiger for its Latin glyphs, and works harmoniously with Neue Frutiger World and Monotype’s CJK typefaces: Tazugane Gothic (Japanese) and M XiangHe Hei (Chinese). Seol Sans is a great choice for global brands using a Sans Serif design looking to maintain their visual identity, and communicate with a consistent tone of voice in the Korean market. Seol Sans has over 18,000 glyphs, and supports the Adobe-Korea1-2 and KS X 1001:2004 character sets.

In drawing the Avenir® typeface, Adrian Frutiger looked to both the past and the future for inspiration. His goal was to reinterpret the geometric sans serif designs of the early part of the 20th century in a typeface that would portend aesthetics of the 21st century. He succeeded handsomely. In doing so, Frutiger added a bit of organic humanism to the design, freeing Avenir from the rigid geometric overtones of the earlier designs. Avenir is employed on signage at Dallas Fort Worth and Hong Kong international airports. The city of Amsterdam adopted Avenir as its corporate typeface in 2003. The original Avenir family is made up of designs with gradual weight changes in order to satisfy the needs of specific text applications. While the book and light weights have similar stroke widths, the book weight is well suited for body text, whereas the light was designed for captions and subhead text. Featured in: Best Fonts for Resumes