Archetype Sans: the story of a typeface with multiple faces

You've probably seen this type of image before. There are several variations, all generated according to the same principles. Take a few hundreds of photographs of individuals, and superimpose them by applying a high transparency value on each. If the frame and proportions are similar for all images, a resulting image will appear, similar to those at the top.

You will see an anonymous face, without specific age or apparent defect, and with an undeniable elegance reminiscent of the beauty of classical sculptures from ancient Greece. In this example, the experiment was conducted with photographs of women of the same nationality, and the result shows a typical picture of the country.

National Geographic has also tried the experiment, but this time with thousands of photographs of men of all nationalities of the world. Here is, according to them, the most typical man on Earth:

His features clearly indicate that a large percentage of the current population of our planet is of Asian origin, something that the Caucasian in me often tend to forget.

And what does all this have to do with a font? I'm getting there, be patient. The English term for a font family is typeface. Type and face, literally, the "face of a letter."

If it is possible to generate these images from human faces, it should also be possible to do the same exercise with "faces of letters" to get a glimpse of the most typical form of the "face" of a given alphabet...That's why I tried the experiment, with rather unexpected results.

First, I thought to restrict the choice of fonts to one family, sans serif, or sans. When the sample has too many variations, the outcome is unclear. It would be therefore unnecessary to overlap, for example, scripts on serifs. Then I selected a hundred fonts among the sans serif family (classics like Helvetica, Univers and Futura, and newer fonts like Myriad, Arial and Gotham), and made a first test with the letter A by superimposing all the fonts with transparency in Illustrator.

A fuzzy "A".

A fuzzy "A", resulting from the superposition of one hundred different fonts. But that can be better defined by changing the brightness and contrast of the image.

A clearer "A".

A typical "A" sans serif. The archetype of the "A" sans serif. Its rounded corners betray its nebulous origin, but its proportions are perfect.

If we apply the same method to all the characters, all the glyphs are clearly defined, and the weights, with few exceptions, are consistent and properly distributed. The ideal base for a font.

The contours are drawn in Illustrator and then imported and assembled in FontForge, to be exported in OpenType format. It is a daunting task, but the result is worth it.

Here is the beta version of two members of the Archetype Sans family, Roman and Medium. Others will follow, but much work remains to be done before a final version of these two variants is ready to use.

I love the elegance of this typeface. It is classic, simple and unpretentious. It has only one fault: it has no characteristic feature. It's not a surprise when you think of its origin.

It was not created by a designer, it appeared because it always existed.