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!
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!
{img: samples of Averia Libre}
There are many different ways of creating things:Â 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.
img: initial process image during the development of Averia; source:Â iotic
img: swelled strokes in Averia
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.
img: different style versions of Averia
img: Averia serif being used on logo for a nectarine farm in Italy; source:Â FontsInUse
img: Averia serif used in its marketing website; source:Â iotic
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?
img: boringAvatar is an open-source project to create SVG avatars; source:Â awesomeopensource
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
img: color inspirations from Sol Le Witt’s drawings
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.
img: transitional serifs have vertical stress and more stroke contrast than old-style serifs, but less than modern serifs
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!
Thanks for being here for another week. Averia is available here.
img: infographic of Averia Libre
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Have more questions about design and fonts?Â
Please email me [email protected] or find me on Twitter at @HuaTweets.
You can also read the past issues on Typogram's blog.