Averia: The Average Font

This is a clever and interesting idea:  creating a new font by taking the average of all existing fonts.

http://iotic.com/averia/

By overlaying all the small letter a‘s, say, from all the different fonts, one can take a visual average and create a new letter a.  Repeat for the whole alphabet, numerals, and punctuation marks, and voila!, you’ve got Averia.

The idea of taking a visual average may be a bit mysterious, but the author describes a few different approaches in how to combine the images.  Essentially all of the instances of a particular symbol are placed on top of each other, and the the darkest parts of the new image are where the instances intersect the most.  The result is then smoothed over to create a readable letter.

And the font looks pretty nice, if not too exciting.  Just what you might expect from the average font.