This typographic poster was made as an assignment for the CALARTS Design Specialization on Coursera.

The challenge was to create an expressive poster to showcase a typeface, as well as the feelings, mood, time period and ideas it conjures up, based on previous research.

Avenir is a geometric typeface designed in the late 80s, heavily inspired by the iconic modernist typeface Futura from the 1920s. The word avenir translates to future in french, which alludes to its main inspiration.

I really like how the use of the same name in a different language brings this idea of it being a new or updated version of the one that came before. So I repeated this process and started playing with the word future in a bunch of other languages.

The word's connotation, future, also played a heavy role on my creative process. I wanted something to illustrate the passage of time, but with a contemporary feel, so that's how I came up with the main theme of the poster: the watch.

The watch indicates the current state, implying that "avenir" is the way to go now, from a pool of possible variations in different languages. It's also a symmetrical object mainly composed of simple geometric shapes, which relates to both the characteristics of the font family and the geometric futurism of the 1920s. 

I decided to go for cold colors, mainly bluish shades, since I associate them with this idea of future and time, but I picked this hot strong red color for the title in order to create contrast and attract focus.

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Special thanks to the Poster Mockup website for the mockup I used on the cover art.