Typophile

Combining Chaparral with Avenir

splice

Hey there all,

I'm a new-to-Typophile print designer of the campus magazine at my uni. It's 16*23cm (~6.3*9 in) and there's plenty of content every month, so the space I can work with is really very limited.

A recent idea of mine is to pair up Avenir and Chaparral Pro in this magazine. The former for titles, the latter for body text.

What's your opinion of this combination? It would be great to hear what you think as I'm in no way an expert on print design. The way I see it, this solid slab serif provides good readability (which is a key factor for me here) and Avenir complements it really well, with the diverse weights and whatnot.

Samples:
Regular 1
Regular 2
Light 1
Light 2

Light or regular? Thoughts in general?
Thanks in advance.

EDIT:

Taking penn's advice, here's a PDF sample of the regular, and the light version.

Nick, I will try a 3-column design, I'm just worried that it'll be too cramped to be read comfortably (approximately ~1.8 inches per column).

Penn Glendinning

It would probably be better if you could post pdfs of your examples as there is some strange coloring going on due to the anti-aliasing of the white text on the black background. From what I can see it looks like a nice pairing.

Nick Shinn

I would go to three columns and less leading.
That seems more like a magazine, less bookish/brochurey.
Also, never run body text across a halftone, even if faded.
You might want to consider adding some lighter weights in the heads (possibly of Chaparral) to spice up the visual interest.

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