Avería: The Average Font (2011)

by JoshTriplett • 9 months ago

233 50 9 months ago

This is an experiment from 2011 in which the author produced a font by averaging all the fonts on their system.

I'm reposting it here because I noticed that this looks a lot like the uncanny valley produced when an image AI tries to make text, which makes perfect sense: it's a statistical average of fonts.

Pxtl• 9 months ago

Yes, I saw the exact same thing when you posted it - "oh, AI text looks like an averaging of fonts".

DeathArrow• 9 months ago

I wonder if you can ask AI to use a particular font for text in generated images.

treetalker2• 9 months ago

Interestingly it evokes Open Dyslexic.

ozim• 9 months ago

I don’t get uncanny valley feel from this one. It feels kind of great for me as a font.

helterskelter• 9 months ago

Same. It looks like the print you see in old books. Very pleasing to the eye. The lower case 'm' sticks out to me though, the second hump is raised a little too high.

Clamchop• 9 months ago

It also reminds me a bit of what text looks like after multiple rounds of photocopying. Like the handouts we'd get in grade school.

ssl-33• 9 months ago

And the smell of weird, purple mimeograph[1] ink.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph

msla• 9 months ago

Interesting how modern designers think readable fonts (with serifs, so people can reliably distinguish between Al and AI, for example) are "uncanny" because they don't follow the latest trends in ultra-minimalist "design" and other fashions.

rebolek• 9 months ago

I like readable serif fonts but this one really looks like an uncanny AI image.

stavros• 9 months ago

Most serif fonts look too noisy to me, I made a website the other day and set a serif font and it immediately stood out to me as cluttered. I have zero design sense, though, so this is just an opinion.

hajile• 8 months ago

Does AI look like this from an average or from training on the reams of copyright free books from a century ago? It seems more like the latter.

peter-m80• 9 months ago

Btw, "Avería" means "failure" in spanish

OseArp• 9 months ago

"Average" comes from Arabic for "damaged goods."

pimlottc• 9 months ago

This is mentioned:

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.

treetalker2• 9 months ago

Arabic ʕawāriyya for (goods) damaged in transit > Catalan avaria for a breakdown, damage > Spanish avería for a breakdown, something that has failed

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avería

jslabovitz• 9 months ago

I've used Averia (Serif Libre, specifically) for at least a decade as my primary font for email, web pages in 'reader' mode, writing long-form text, etc. I find it extremely legible, and even calming.

Ironically, I've been a typographer for decades, both for print and online. Averia might seem an odd choice for someone intimately familiar with typographic theory/history and the vast catalog of possible fonts. But there's a certain pleasure and comfort in a font that is not trying to stand out or do anything particularly special.

bitwize2• 9 months ago

It's kind of like how if you take the average of enough male or female human faces, the result is a very pleasing, attractive face.

abound• 9 months ago

Same with music, a large group of people singing slightly off-key (each in their own way) tends to sound pretty good in aggregate

toledocavani• 9 months ago

That's interesting, because my intuition of an "average" face is, well, average and uninteresting. Can you share your source?

zeroq2• 9 months ago

The main reason it has this "calming" feature is because it's imperfect. By averaging different, sometimes incompatible font faces the result looks like a letter pressed on a soft paper, with all it's natural imperfections. It looks real.

Somehow I was not aware of Averia and used Old Timey for exact same reasons in the past.

On the other hand, someone here mentioned "Lato", which to me looks exactly how two robots would write holiday postcards to each other.

seabass• 9 months ago

I’m surprised by how good it looks. This is really cool! I do feel like the Q and 4 characters need a little manual tweaking since the blur+threshold technique leaves some artifacts in the corners but those are such minor issues given how readable this font is overall. Love it.

moss_dog• 9 months ago

Very cool project, thank you for sharing! To me, it raises some interesting questions around attribution of sources in derived works, in the same way that AI training does.

tiltowait• 9 months ago

I kind of dig this. It seems like it might look good on an ereader. Might have to upload it to my kobo!

humanfromearth9• 9 months ago

Looks blurry on my phone.

DarkMarkQuark• 9 months ago

The site uses bitmap images, not web fonts.

october8140• 9 months ago

https://fonts.google.com/?query=Averia

adem• 9 months ago

I'd love to see the results for the same process used on monospace fonts.

pratyahava• 8 months ago

yesss, waiting for it. i started using this font in my text editor and i find it super comfortable so i would love the same experience in my terminal.

0_____03• 9 months ago

Does this font simply ... Not look good to anyone else? It is visually kind of uncomfortable to behold. Maybe it's because it's a bit blurry feeling.

It sort of suggests to me that there's a lot going on with typeface design that we take for granted.

Edit: on closer inspection, the letter forms are kind of all over the place. The humps on the 'm' are lopsided, letter heights are sort of random. I think it's an interesting idea but to make it a more useful font would take a lot of manual fine tuning.

mediumdeviation• 9 months ago

It's because the website is using cufon, a very early attempt at supporting custom fonts on the web using HTML canvas - basically every word you see is rendered as an image rather than text. The end result does not look good on hi-dpi screens like modern Macbook displays, probably they did not exist back then. The site mentions Google Font has a hosted version of it now and you can look at how it is meant to be rendered https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Averia+Libre

vessenes• 9 months ago

Wow, that looks completely different than how Safari rendered the site. Thanks for the link. I like the look of it hosted at Google.

0_____03• 9 months ago

Aaahhh, thank you.

It still looks a little funky but way more readable.

deckar01• 9 months ago

Try the GWF Serif variant. It has more satisfying symmetry. Other than 4.

0_____03• 8 months ago

This actually is a charming font. With the random letter form sizing fixed, it reminds me of scans of old print publications. Thank you.

crazygringo• 9 months ago

This is really cool. There's something very pleasing about precisely how unobtrusive it feels. You can also view the specifically serif-only and sans-serif-only versions here:

http://iotic.com/averia/preview.php

I think it would be really cool if a designer used these as a starting point for overall metrics, but then regularized and cleaned them up to exhibit consistent proportions and elements from character to character, without the wobbly parts. It really feels like it would become an ideal font family for reader mode, for journaling, just any time you want to focus on content and have a font that just "gets out of the way".

jen729w• 9 months ago

We already have the average font and it’s the execrable Lato.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lato

jgalt2122• 9 months ago

I think this font would look great for printed clues for a mystery game. Or on treasure map where the fonts tend to be over the top and illegible.

lovegrenoble• 9 months ago

Thank you, I love it!

cernocky• 9 months ago

Reminds me of Supernormal font [1] averaged from widely popular fonts.

[1] https://research.public.services/typography/

msk-lywenn• 9 months ago

It's been used in some visual novels by Nova-box:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/957820/Across_the_Grooves...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/738650/Seers_Isle/

zeroq2• 9 months ago

Reminds me of Old Timey [1] a lot.

What I really love about both of them is that they instantly give you the impression of a real print made with real ink. Especially Averia - which makes sense, since it was averaged from all sorts of different fonts - has a lot of, for the lack of better word, excess fat on it. Something that may happen accidently while pressing "precise" font letter on soft paper.

[1] https://webonastick.com/fonts/old-timey-mono/

ofalkaed• 8 months ago

It looks like they need to turn down the ink flow on the press or the plate is a bit past its prime. I like it.

Avería: The Average Font (2011)

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