While many people think of the Adventist symbol as the church logo, typically “logo” refers to the combination of a symbol with a custom type treatment of a name (think Apple or Nike). For some organizations a logo consists simply of custom type, known as a wordmark (eg Google). For our organization, however, it isn’t useful or even possible to create a type treatment for a single name and ensure its consistent usage across the world. Our name changes in every language, and every entity has its own unique name. New churches are being formed and named every few minutes, most including more detail than simply “Seventh-day Adventist Church.”
While this project began as a commission to extend the logo system, we discovered through the process that we need something more useful than hundreds of custom wordmarks. What we need is a global, multi-language type system.
By chance, or by Providence, there is at the moment only one existing universal typeface in the world, and it was recently released. Commissioned by Google and designed by the renowned Monotype foundry, Noto’s extensive language coverage took five years to design, cost millions of dollars to create, and now covers over 800 languages.
We chose to use Noto as the basis for what we are calling Advent Sans. Built on the extensive language coverage of Noto Sans, Advent Sans will allow us to communicate consistency across the world. We have made extensive modifications to the latin and cyrillic alphabets, and where applicable, we have made some recommendations for non-western character sets.
Unless using pre-existing entity logos/wordmarks, it is recommended that entities transition to or use Advent Sans to set their entity names moving forward. Using the provided font files and name-setting templates can help ensure a consistent visual device that can help viewers recognize we are all Seventh-day Adventists.
Advent Sans fonts are open source. All Advent Sans fonts are published under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. You may find the most current Advent Sans fonts and naming templates here: