In 1988, the Swiss typeface designer first presented Avenir to the public, which already at that time marked an excellent alternative to other well known typefaces such as Futura® or Avant Garde®. Compared to the mere metric construction of other typefaces, Avenir was convincing because of its optical construction which lent it a more humane appearance, as seen, for instance, in the classically drawn “a”.

The word avenir is French for “future”. The font takes inspiration from the early geometric sans-serif typefaces Erbar (1922), designed by Jakob Erbar, and Futura (1927), designed by Paul Renner. Frutiger intended Avenir to be a more organic, humanist interpretation of these highly geometric types. While similarities can be seen with Futura, the two-story lowercase a is more like Erbar, and also recalls Frutiger’s earlier namesake typeface, Frutiger.

Frutiger considers Avenir his finest work. ‘The quality of the draughtsmanship – rather than the intellectual idea behind it – is my masterpiece. (…) It was the hardest typeface I have worked on in my life. Working on it, I always had human nature in mind. And what’s crucial is that I developed the typeface alone, in peace and quiet – no drafting assistants, no-one was there. My personality is stamped upon it. I’m proud that I was able to create Avenir.’

The current set of weights is therefore ultra light, thin, light, regular, medium, demi bold, bold and heavy, in four styles each (two widths and italics for each width). The installation on OS X does not include the thin and light weights, but does include Greek and Cyrillic glyphs in the regular width.