am not a type designer. This is the story of the creation of a new font, Avería: the average of all the fonts on my computer. The field of typography has long fascinated me, and I love playing with creative programming ideas, so it was perhaps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “generative typography”. A Google on the subject brought up little, and I put the idea to the back of my mind until it occurred to me that perhaps the process of averaging, or interpolating, existing fonts might bring up interesting results. Luckily at this point I didn’t do any more web searching – instead I grabbed my laptop and came up with an initial idea for finding what the average of all my fonts might look like – by overlaying each lette…
am not a type designer. This is the story of the creation of a new font, Avería: the average of all the fonts on my computer. The field of typography has long fascinated me, and I love playing with creative programming ideas, so it was perhaps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “generative typography”. A Google on the subject brought up little, and I put the idea to the back of my mind until it occurred to me that perhaps the process of averaging, or interpolating, existing fonts might bring up interesting results. Luckily at this point I didn’t do any more web searching – instead I grabbed my laptop and came up with an initial idea for finding what the average of all my fonts might look like – by overlaying each letter at low opacity. The results can be seen in the below image.
This was done by printing each letter of each font, at the same point size, to lots of separate images, and then averaging them – using ImageMagick and PHP. The letters were aligned to the same centre point. I later realised that each font has a ‘baseline’ defined, and an origin on that baseline which each glyph is drawn relative to. The same process, repeated with equal origins, gives slightly different results (see below) – here you can see the baseline is very well-defined, with the glyphs becoming more blurred towards the top right of each.
I was quite pleased with the results. It was only later that I discovered this had already been done – though it appeared that my end results (whilst not as beautifully animated) had a little more clarity, so I’m glad I tried for myself. But this didn’t seem like the end of the journey. Whilst this was an interesting experiment, and showed an lot of correlation between a sample of common fonts (as well as a couple of oddities – notably the lower case ‘g’ which clearly exists in two distinct common forms), what I really wanted was an average which somehow preserved the well-defined edges of existing fonts. So I started considering ways to produce a smoother, sharper average of letter forms.
One idea which seemed obvious was to simply take the blurry results of the first experiment, and use a threshold to create monochrome images. A few experiments in this direction (I first tried with a lower-case ‘f’, which I later found was never likely to give good results due to the variance in height of the middle cross-stroke) convinced me that I needed to look into cleverer ways to achieve this. Surely there must be a simple way to average shapes, while keeping the result as a shape?
It turns out not to be straightforward. There are many possible ways to ‘morph’ between two shapes – and what might seem the most natural generally depends on our perception of ‘features’ in the shapes. Consider the average of a capital I with serifs, and one without: the natural thing to do would be something like, make the serifs half as big, and use a horizontal stem width about half-way between the two glyphs. That’s two feature concepts being applied to the abstract forms¹. To take a simpler example, what is the average of a square with the same square rotated 45˚? There are a few possibilities …
So, this stumped me for a while. I decided I needed to get to know fonts better, so I built a simple web app to view the lines, curves and control points present in the fonts I had. On this basis, I started to consider the ways the features (vertices, curves, stems, serifs etc) might be matched up between fonts. However, this was a rabbit hole I might never get to the bottom of - particularly when considering some of the more unusual varieties of font. Perhaps there was a simpler idea that was evading me.
Then it occurred to me: since my aim was to average a large number of fonts, perhaps it would be best to use a very simple process, and hope the results averaged out well over a large number of fonts. So, how about splitting each letter perimeter into lots of (say, 500) equally-spaced points, and just average between the corresponding positions of each, on each letter? It would be necessary to match up the points so they were about the same location in each letter, and then the process would be fairly simple².
Having found a simple process to use, I was ready to start. And after about a month of part-time slaving away (sheer fun! Better than any computer game) – in the process of which I learned lots about bezier curves and font metrics – I had a result. I call it Avería – which is a Spanish word related to the root of the word ‘average’. It actually means mechanical breakdown or damage. This seemed curiously fitting, and I was assured by a Spanish friend-of-a-friend that “Avería is an incredibly beautiful word regardless of its meaning”. So that’s nice.
Along the way I naturally called on the counsel of the best designers I know – my brother Nick Sayers, Lloyd Thomas, Tom Muller and Chris McGrail, for advice. In the end, I decided to release the font using the SIL Open Font License – which means anyone can use it pretty much however they like – and to include within the family Regular, Bold and Light variants with Italics. Each is made from the corresponding subsets of the fonts on my machine. Also included is a “Gruesa” version made from all my fonts (725 in total).
Avería Family (ZIP, 369kB) [Updated 9 Nov 2011] Avería at The Open Font Library
*NEW* by popular demand: Avería Serif Family (ZIP, 323kB) OFLB Avería Sans Family (ZIP, 320kB) OFLB
*NEW* Avería, Serif and Sans packaged as TTC TrueType collections (so you can install each family in one go, rather than one variant at a time). Thanks Ludwig: Avería TTC Files (ZIP, 946kB)
*NEW* versions of Avería, based on OFL fonts from the Google Web Fonts directory - now available through GWF as Avería Libre: Avería GWF Family (ZIP, 488kB) Avería Serif GWF Family (ZIP, 432kB) Avería Sans GWF Family (ZIP, 426kB)
Feel free to email me if you have any questions – or use the comments box below.
N.B. I’ve had a number of emails from people asking if they can use Avería in various commercial / non-commercial projects. I’d love to hear if you do something with these fonts – but there’s no need to ask permission. You are absolutely free to use them however you like.
Footnotes
1. In fact, there exist some interesting-looking typographic tools which do seem to offer the ability to interpolate between fonts – with an appreciation of the features which define the character of different typefaces. One is Superpolator; another is Font Remix Tools, for FontLab. Whilst I would love to play with these, they are rather out of the price range for an amateur like myself. Thankfully the open source fontforge was on hand and very useful for this project.
2. A problem I met along the way was how to deal with two particularly problematic cases – the lower case ‘a’ and ‘g’. Both these exist in two different common forms – and the ‘g’ is particularly tricky as one variation has two holes, while the other has only one. After experimenting with various ways to compare the two and find a happy mean, I decided to simply choose the most common form, which turned out to be the one-hole g, the ‘round’ a for italics and the ‘hooked’ a for non-italic cases.