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FontDiscovery 🖼️ 38: Communicate Tenderness with Averia

I'm Hua, a designer and bootstrapping founder building Typogram, a brand design tool. As part of running Typogram, I create this digestible weekly guide with fonts, colors, and design ideas to help founders, creators, and makers step up their game in marketing and get creative!


Hi Everyone đź‘‹

I hope you had a great weekend! Last week my co-founder Wenting @wentin and I bought the domain codingfont.com. We are domain hoarders, and this one was such a steal. It’s a .com and had no name hacks like “5howtime.” We were so excited that we bought a 10-year plan for it. I will share more as we are near launch, but we have some exciting things planned!


In This Issue

  • Theme: Computation
  • Fonts: Averia
  • Marketing Idea of the Week: Open-Source Projects
  • Color Inspiration of the Week: The System of Sol LeWitt

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{img: samples of Averia Libre}


Font of the Week

Averia, the Averaging Font

There are many different ways of creating things:  One method is to create an idea entirely from scratch based on inspirations and chanced encounters. Another way is to research many references and create a unique blueprint. Which do you use?

Averia’s maker used the second method. He created Averia by averaging all the fonts on his computer. At the start of his process, he overlaid different fonts on top of each other at low opacity, then converted each layer to monochrome images. The blurry shapes from the reference images served as a good preview visualization for letterforms in Averia.

He then improved this process by looking for the average coordinate positions among the points to be more efficient. The averaging resulted in the soft and swelled strokes you see in this Averia Libre.

https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F973f73ee-d6c3-4787-9e11-213b317e2294_716x462.png

img: initial process image during the development of Averia; source: iotic

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img: swelled strokes in Averia

Font Details

There are several different styles of Averia. Averia Libre is an average of all the fonts; Averia Sans Libre includes is the average of all the sans serif, whereas Averia Serif Libre is the average of all the serifs. Averia Sans Libre feels the most gentle because it looks thinner and softer than other style versions.

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img: different style versions of Averia

How to use it for logo?

  • Softness and swelled up strokes gives a brush appearance, hand-crafted feeling
  • Communicates warmth, artisanal, gentleness

How to use it for marketing?

  • Each Serif, Sans, and Libre version has three weights and is available in regular and italic styles.
  • Averia Serif and Sans serif can pair with each other
  • Serif is good for editorial; Sans and Libre is excellent for body copy

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img: Averia serif being used on logo for a nectarine farm in Italy; source: FontsInUse

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img: Averia serif used in its marketing website; source: iotic


Marketing Idea of the Week

Open-Source Project

In tech, an open-source project means that it is a community project that everyone can contribute. Many fonts in this newsletter are open-sourced. Their project files are on Github, and anyone can download the source files and create modifications to them. Having a community project like this can foster a sense of community and empowerment through group ownership. Free projects that allow everyone can modify and share can be a great source of marketing. Can you think of a simple project that everyone can modify and share?

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img: boringAvatar is an open-source project to create SVG avatars; source: awesomeopensource


Color Inspiration of the Week

The System of Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt was a fine artist who worked in a very computational way. He used different components in various combinations and permutations to create many different versions of the drawings.

Beige red: #C7988E | Soft yellow: #EAE381 | Soft blue: #97B2C1

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img: color inspirations from Sol Le Witt’s drawings


Jargon Buster!

Transitional Serif

First Seen: mid-18th century

Transitional serifs are in-between “Old Style” and “Modern” serifs (we will cover these in the next newsletter). In these serif types, the contrast between thick and thin strokes is more pronounced. Sometimes you will see ball terminals and vertical stress. The capital letter R usually has a curved tail.

  • Example: Times New Roman
  • Stroke Contrast: ++

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img: transitional serifs have vertical stress and more stroke contrast than old-style serifs, but less than modern serifs


Creative Prompt

Write a plan for a project you can create to allow everyone to contribute. If you feel like sharing, I would love to see it!


Thank you!

Thanks for being here for another week. Averia is available here.

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img: infographic of Averia Libre


If you enjoy this series, you can subscribe here:

Have more questions about design and fonts? 
Please email me [email protected] or find me on Twitter at @HuaTweets.
You can also read the past issues on Typogram's blog.

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