The future: to buy or not to buy?

[Member Red…]

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I need some guidance on the Avenir typeface and I guess the Frutiger System:

An agency have mocked up some web designs for us using a non system standard font as a headline: Avenir Book 45.

Not withstanding the issues of not being able to use it as live text, can I use '45' at variable sizes for print and if so is it a case of the layout package resizing it as obviously '45' should be of a fixed size and weight?

There's no way my company will shell out for the updated whole family (Avenir Next is £850) If resizing Book 45 to big sizes for exhibition stands etc is not going to work, can anyone suggest a decent system font (apart from Helvetica and it's Knock-off Arial) that I could use instead and thus avoid all of these issues?

Thanks a lot,

Owen

[Member cla…]

Relax! You can use 45 for what ever size you want. The number used in a font is a concatenation of two numbers. The first set defines weight, while the second defines width and position. The 45 refers to it's weight, width and style. 4 means it's light (or book), and 5 that it is of normal width, and 5 being an odd number that it is an upright (roman) design. If the second number is even, it's a oblique style.

More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers

[Member Red…]

Thanks very much, got a bit bent up thinking that my layout packages were resizing it poorly like the bold feature in quark would do for some typefaces - what a muppet - unfortunately no-one here could tell me any different so thanks again.

[Member alu…]

850 can seem like a lot for a full typeface family, but surely that's just a fraction of the cost of the entire trade shoe exhibit budget, no?