Type Research

Avant Garde

Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase designed Avant Garde around 1968. It was based on Lubalin’s logo for Avant Garde magazine. The original face was all uppercase. Avant Garde was the first typeface released by ITC when the company was founded in 1970. Next to being used in all types of art publications, Avant Garde was a classic in  ’70s advertising design.

Additional versions include the condensed fonts which were created by Ed Benguiat.The OpenType version of Avant Garde Gothic Pro that was released in 2005 includes a suite of additional cap and lowercase alternates as well as new ligatures.

Avant Garde is a display font, meant to be used for headlines and short texts. Use it if you need a retro 70’s look or want something that really stands out. It can be pretty difficult to actually use this font the way it was intended to be used. This comment from Ed Benguiat sums it up nicely: “The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde. Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.”

Identifying Characteristics

    * bowl of R doesn't close, but P does

    * curve on tail of cap Q

    * abbreviated descenders (esp. g)

    * low crossbar on G

    * rectangular dots over i and j

Character and Use

A distinctive geometric display face, which Lubalin said should be set very tight. A good version comes with a number of unusual uppercase ligatures. The face retains some of the flavor of the late sixties/early seventies.

In 1964, Lubalin  formed his own design consultation firm named Herb Lubalin, Inc. It was during these years that he collaborated with Ralph Ginzburg on Eros, Fact and Avant Garde where he served as creative director and designer for these publications. Five years later Herb Lubalin, Inc. became LSC, Inc., incorporating the talents of Ernie Smith, Tom Carnase, and Roger Ferriter. A year after that, several subsidiaries were added: Lubalin, Delpire & Cie, Paris, Lubalin, Maxwell Ltd., London, Good Book Inc. (“a highly unsuccessful publishing venture”), and Lubalin, Burns & Co., with its highly successful typographic offspring, International Typeface Corporation.

Lubalin designed the typeface Avant Garde for the last of these magazines. The font was not originally designed as a commercial typeface – it was simply the logo for a magazine. Lubalin’s letterforms with tight-fitting combinations reflected Ginzburg’s desire to capture “the advanced, the innovative, the creative.” The character fit was so perfectly tight that they created a futuristic, instantly recognizable identity for the publication. Later he and Tom Carnase, a partner in Lubalin’s design firm, worked together to transform the idea into a full-fledged typeface.

“I asked him to picture a very modern, clean European airport (or the TWA terminal), with signs in stark black and white,” Ginzburg’s wife and collaborator, Shoshana recalled, “Then I told him to imagine a jet taking off the runway into the future. I used my hand to describe an upward diagonal of the plane climbing skyward. He had me do that several times. I explained that the logos he had offered us for this project, so far, could have been on any magazine but that Avant Garde (adventuring into unknown territory) by its very name was something nobody had seen before. We needed something singular and entirely new.”

According to Ralph Ginzberg, “The next morning, driving to work from his home in Woodmere he pulled over to the side of the road and phoned me (the first time he ever did that). ‘Ralph, I’ve got it. You’ll see.’ And the rest is design history.”

Given the high volume of requests for the font, Lubalin formed Lubalin, Burns & Co. (which later became the International Typeface Corporation) and released ITC Avant Garde in 1970. Unfortunately, Lubalin quickly realized that Avant Garde was widely misunderstood and misused in poorly thought-out solutions, eventually becoming a stereotypical 1970s font due to overuse.

Tony DiSpigna, one of Lubalin’s partners and co-creator of ITC Lubalin Graph and ITC Serif Gothic, has been quoted as saying, “The first time Avant Garde was used was one of the few times it was used correctly. It’s become the most abused typeface in the world.” Ed Benguiat, one of type’s legends and a friend of Lubalin’s, commented, “The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde. Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.” Steven Heller also noted that the “excessive number of ligatures […] were misused by designers who had no understanding of how to employ these typographic forms,” further commenting that “Avant Garde was Lubalin’s signature, and in his hands it had character; in others’ it was a flawed Futura-esque face.”

The strength of the Avant Garde font is certainly in its all-cap ligatures and it should be used as it was originally intended – a display face whose ligatures can be carefully crafted into magnificent letterform combinations. There were two original designs of ITC Avant Garde Gothic: one for setting headlines and one for text copy. The display design contained ligatures and alternate characters and the text design did not. Unfortunately, when Avant Garde Gothic was turned into a digital font, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included leaving designers with the least interesting aspect of the font.

Garamond

The Garamond Font Family is based on roman types cut by Jean Jannon in 1615. Jannon followed the designs of Claude Garamond which had been cut in the previous century. The Garamond Font Family's types were, in turn, based on those used by Aldus Manutius in 1495 and cut by Francesco Griffo. The is based on types cut in France circa 1557 by Robert Granjon. This version of Garamond Font Family was introduced in 1922 for hot metal typecasters. The Garamond font is a magnificent typeface with an air of informality which looks good in a wide range of applications. Garamond font is most suitable and works particularly well in books and lengthy text settings. Garamond fonts are available in both Opentype (.otf) and TrueType (.ttf) font formats.

Garamond typefaces, in both their American and European flavours, are generally considered ideal book faces. The design is also an excellent choice for most other forms of continuous text. Magazines, newsletters, annual reports, lengthy advertising copy are all naturals for the Garamond design. Elegance, warmth, readability, legibility are guaranteed. It is both successful in long continuous writings and also short blocks of writings.

The Garamonds of the Garalde family, as opposed to their humanist and realist counterparts, date back to the 16th century. In rupture with the drawing of humanist typefaces, these were the work of designers who used the pantograph to punch minutely aligned designs, quite unlike the humanist typefaces that were still the work of scriptoriums, drawn by quill on vellum. In the 20th century we were blessed by audacious foundries and Bezier curves with roughly 5-6 declinations from the original drawn by Claude Garamond.
Francesco Simoncini's Garamond (of the Simoncini foundry of Bologna, 1958), and that of the Stempel foundry (which later became Linotype), designed in 1924 in Frankfurt; the Garamond developed by Monotype in 1922 by Fritz Max Steltzer at Salfords; and more recently, thanks to Postscript and Bezier curves, that of Adobe, drawn up by Robert Slimbach in San Francisco in 1988, preceded by Tony Stan's very elegant Garamond of 1970 for the International Typeface Corp in New York. Berthold too, taking a design similar to the Garamond of Deberny and Peignot, committed to type a design that would remain among the closest to the original, whose punches are currently carefully arranged in the punches cabinet presently closed to the public in the Imprimerie Nationale. Here are the different traces of the G of Garamond, arranged such that we can see they are in fact completely different models, whose curves do not superimpose.

 

http://barneycarroll.com/garamond.htm

References

http://www.linotype.com/483/aboutthedesigner.html
http://www.linotype.com/362/tomcarnase.html
http://www.prepressure.com/fonts/interesting/avant-garde
http://www.rightreading.com/typehead/avant_garde.htm
http://www.ascendercorp.com/font/garamond/
http://www.linotype.com/3474/justwhatmakesaldquogaramondrdquoagaramond.html

http://barneycarroll.com/garamond.htm

http://www.creativepro.com/article/dot-font-avant-garde-then-and-nowhttp://thinkingforaliving.org/blog/entry/a-brief-history-of-avant-garde

http://www.fonts.com/NR/rdonlyres/EF8A90A6-66C8-40D5-95F8-AEF62BB05705/0/ILGaramond.pdf