Avería: an "average" font


Dan Sayers ("I am not a type designer") decided to explore "generative" type-design by seeing what happened when he "averaged out" a large number of fonts. Once he got his teeth into the problem, he realized that "averaging out" is a complicated idea when it comes to shapes, and came up with a pretty elegant way of handling the problem, which, in turn, yielded a rather lovely face: Avería, "the average font."

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 simple

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.

Avería – The Average Font

(via Waxy)