Avenir has been my ‘flavour of the month’ typeface for about a year now. I moved on to it after a lengthy love affair with Frutiger and you can see (below) that it’s really just Frutiger mashed with Futura — it’s not surprising that it appeals to me.

What is surprising is that I like it because of it’s hybrid qualities, since I dislike the original Futura face quite a bit. Over the last decade, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to use Futura in a design without really struggling to have it look good (to me). Until a year or two ago, I thought I inherently disliked something about the font, but then realised that I often liked it when it was used by others. My admiration of a certain piece of work always followed the same pattern…

1) Nice work
2) That’s a nice colour pallete and the structure is interesting
3) The type’s pretty solid too
4) Oh wow, that’s Futura… uhhh, okay. I guess the ‘wow’ has to remain… dammit.

Basically, I think I like Avenir, because it allows me to pretend to use Futura and lets me feel like I’ve overcome some design limitation of mine!

The current honourable mention goes to Storm’s John Sans which is a lovely sans-serif face that also feels like it has the traditional qualities of a serif.

After a little reading, it turns out that it’s meant to be used in conjunction with John Baskerville, so I guess it makes sense that it looks the way it does, though I tend to use it independently.