Project Lead: New Brand Font
The Story
For a long time, The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) enjoyed a grandfathered font license for Avenir, our digital and print brand font, with the foundry Monotype. When Monotype announced that they were retiring that contract, our costs were going to skyrocket. Budget-strapped, the administration approached the Office of Marketing and Communications team (OMC) to find a free or low-cost alternative font that mimicked Avenir. I volunteered to lead the effort
The Happy Ending
A group of designers, a web programmer, and I researched, found, and critiqued a collection of candidate fonts. I created an evaluation rubric based on Avenir’s unique system of sans-serif glyphs to facilitate the elimination of as many candidates as possible. Once narrowed down to three fonts, we closely examined Avenir’s most distinctive glyphs to identify the closest alternative: Google’s Red Hat Text. Our web programmer tested the font on the university’s website for its digital compatibility. We presented our work to the university administration, who approved the retiring of Avenir and the adoption of Red Hat Text. The bonus? It was free, saving the university $7,000 per year in licensing fees.
