[HN Gopher] Averia: The Average Font (2011)
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Averia: The Average Font (2011)
Author : JoshTriplett
Score : 218 points
Date : 2025-11-08 19:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (iotic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (iotic.com)
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes, I saw the exact same thing when you posted it - "oh, AI
| text looks like an averaging of fonts".
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wonder if you can ask AI to use a particular font for text in
| generated images.
| treetalker wrote:
| Interestingly it evokes Open Dyslexic.
| ozim wrote:
| I don't get uncanny valley feel from this one. It feels kind of
| great for me as a font.
| helterskelter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-3 wrote:
| And the smell of weird, purple mimeograph[1] ink.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph
| fsckboy wrote:
| [2]
|
| [2]: I just wanted to add the most unnecessary footnote
| formatting possible as a kindness, so yours would no longer
| hold the crown as worst
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That's clever, but:
|
| I've been called out previously here for having
| unknowingly _introduced_ some undefined terms to readers,
| and which they found to be perplexing.
|
| And I took that to heart, because I don't want my words
| to be perplexing. I instead want them to be clear and
| easily understood.
|
| In my corner of the world, I haven't held a mimeographed
| document in my hands for ~35 years. I found it reasonable
| to assume that a non-zero amount of people here might
| find the term to be unfamiliar.
|
| So I provided definition of the term on the basis that it
| may be unknown to some readers, and that more information
| is better than inadequate information.
|
| In this instance I would have preferred to use
| hyperlinked text for visual brevity, but that's not a
| thing on HN. The normal and accepted style on HN consists
| instead of using footnotes.
|
| And at this point, generating footnotes is nearly
| entirely muscle memory for me. So a footnote (with a URL)
| was included.
|
| Thank you for your attention on this matter, fsckboy. I'm
| pleased to discover that you've found my footnote to be
| so unusually compelling.
| rkomorn wrote:
| For some reason, that smell is one of my favorite memories
| from my early school years. I really liked it.
|
| That combined with the magic of "Wow! Copies?!"
| msla wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I like readable serif fonts but this one really looks like an
| uncanny AI image.
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| peter-m80 wrote:
| Btw, "Averia" means "failure" in spanish
| OseArp wrote:
| "Average" comes from Arabic for "damaged goods."
| pimlottc wrote:
| This is mentioned:
|
| > I call it Averia - 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 "Averia is an
| incredibly beautiful word regardless of its meaning". So that's
| nice.
| treetalker wrote:
| Arabic _?awariyya_ for (goods) damaged in transit > Catalan
| _avaria_ for a breakdown, damage > Spanish _averia_ for a
| breakdown, something that has failed
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/averia
| jslabovitz wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's interesting, because my intuition of an "average" face
| is, well, average and uninteresting. Can you share your
| source?
| bitwize wrote:
| Here's one of the papers concerning
| "averageness=attractiveness": https://www.sciencedirect.com
| /science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
|
| The trick is that there are two "averages" in play. Let's
| call them the "attractiveness average" and the "physical
| average". Your intuition concerns the attractiveness
| average: you know that there are beautiful people and ugly
| people, and "average people" must be somewhere in the
| middle, yes?
|
| But when scientists average faces to create a perceived
| attractive face, they're averaging together the _physical
| characteristics_ of each face: distance between the eyes,
| position of nose and ears on the head, size of mouth,
| symmetry, etc. The claim is that we have an intuitive,
| perhaps instinctual, notion of what humans "should" look
| like and our perception of attractiveness is roughly a
| measure of conformation to that standard. So an intuitively
| "average-looking" person is more correctly stated as having
| a medium amount of deviation from the human mean.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| The average face should be perfectly symmetrical assuming
| iid. Perfectly symmetrical faces are generally seen as
| attractive across all cultures.
| zeroq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I kind of dig this. It seems like it might look good on an
| ereader. Might have to upload it to my kobo!
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| Looks blurry on my phone.
| DarkMarkQuark wrote:
| The site uses bitmap images, not web fonts.
| october8140 wrote:
| https://fonts.google.com/?query=Averia
| adem wrote:
| I'd love to see the results for the same process used on
| monospace fonts.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_____0 wrote:
| Aaahhh, thank you.
|
| It still looks a little funky but way more readable.
| deckar01 wrote:
| Try the GWF Serif variant. It has more satisfying symmetry.
| Other than 4.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We already have the average font and it's the execrable Lato.
|
| https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lato
| jgalt212 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you, I love it!
| cernocky wrote:
| Reminds me of Supernormal font [1] averaged from widely popular
| fonts.
|
| [1]: https://research.public.services/typography/
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| 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/
| zeroq wrote:
| 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/
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(page generated 2025-11-09 23:01 UTC)