Avame Free Font Download
About Avame
I’ve decided to reintroduce Avame as a free font download. Designed by myself, Philip Boelter, in 2009. Avame was created with the inspiration of street art and two fonts, Avant Garde and Bauhaus. I was infatuated with ligatures and wanted to design a font that included various ligatures, retain the cleanliness of straight sharp lines, and be able to use the font for stencil work in street art.
1. Avant Garde
Through the late 2000’s, Avant Garde was being used on everything advertising, and I fell in love with the font for it’s clean sharp lines, its “A”, and the various ligatures in the suite. Avant Garde is distinct with it’s sharp lines and bold gothic style that make it perfect for headlines and stand out.
Apparently, it was designed only to look good written as Avant Garde, but I found using the glyphs and ligatures to be therapeutic when designing. In my opinion, the lines all make for a great font to be played with to create your own logos. Certain letters simply stand out on their own, like “A”, “R”, and NT. You can spot Avant Garde by the slanted A glyph or the way the bowl of the R sharply stops at the stem. I’ve found bringing the letters closer together or intersecting them work better than most other fonts. It’s awesome to see all the great ligatures in the collection of Avant Garde. The ligatures looked like logos in their own right, which made me think of how I wanted to design Avame with similar ways of incorporating ligatures that were useful in creating beautiful logos.
2. Bauhaus
Bauhaus inspired my creation of Avame, but what hasn’t Bauhaus inspired. Being one of the most influential fonts of the twentieth century, it is a font that is ingrained in most of our minds, but I love the simplicity of the strokes, roundness, and retro vibes.
The typeface has open-ended strokes that work well for stencils. With the open-ended strokes, this made the use of the font easier to cut out and use for graffiti art. Most fonts always need a little line that would hold the open counter of a glyph, but not ITC Bauhaus. Like Avant Garde, Bauhaus has bold strokes that make it great for headlines and logotype. This made it perfectly suitable to work well with a font like Avant Garde. Bauhaus was designed early in the 20th century, but I found that I was more inspired by the ITC version from 1975. This version has a retro feel that was making a huge comeback in the late 2000’s, just like Avant Garde. The two fonts are so similar yet so different. One being sharp, the other being a bit more rounded.
3. Street Art
In the late 2000’s, street art was gaining huge traction because of artists like Shepard Fairey, Banksy, and urban areas being gentrified. Obey and Shepard Fairey were on top of the world with the Obama “Hope” poster. Obey’s Shepard Fairey, already huge in the street art scene, became a public figure when Obama used his now iconic poster for his first election run.
After Shepard Fairey received attention more than ever, so did the scene of street art. Contributing to the street art scene is probably the most iconic of them all, Banksy. His iconic pieces of street art increasingly became more and more sought after most likely due to social media and stores like urban outfitters. Now, you don’t have to go to London to enjoy one of Banksy’s art pieces, you can view it online, or pick up a coffee table book. But because he created such fascinating ways of street art, people wanted to see it and enjoy it, which only helped spur the rise of street artists. Around urban cities being gentrified, vandalization slowly became more visual street art. I created Avame while I lived in San Diego, and I was lucky to have lived in a city with so much rad street art that contributed to more of my inspiration. It wasn’t uncommon to see Invader’s 8-bit pixelated video game caricatures, Shepard Fairey’s Andre the Giant stickers, or badass murals like the ones common in Chicano park. It’s no wonder why I was so infatuated with street art; It surrounded me and my life, that I decided I wanted to design Avame with a boldness that a street artist would consider using one day.
Avame Free Font Download
I hope you enjoy Avame free font download. I would love to see it used, so please share anything you design using Avame.