And that’s how the logotype for Avant-Garde magazine was born.” The designer who drew the final version (1967) was Tom Carnase.

To my knowledge, nobody had ever fooled around with cap ligatures. Not lower case ligatures, not upper and lower case ligatures. He said: ‘Cut it out!’ When a man is as graphically astute as Ralph Ginzburg, one is hard put to dazzle him with anything but something completely out of the ordinary. Lubalin wrote: “I tried to dazzle him with a multitude of ornate swashes, which usually does the trick with less knowing clients. At first, Ginzburg was unhappy with all of Lubalin’s proposals. In his definitive Lubalin book (Unit Editions, 2012), Adrian Shaughnessy sketches the history of the logo. The Avant-Garde logo (the hyphen and camel case in the mag’s name was how they usually wrote it) was the first thing drawn with the new all-caps alphabet. Lettering artists in Lubalin’s studio, like Lubalin’s partner Tom Carnase, and Tony Di Spigna, were working overtime to draw Lubalin’s lettering designs or invent their own. Try a search!Īs 8 out of 10 visitors to this site will know, ITC Avant Garde Gothic was born here: on the covers and pages of Avant-Garde magazine, edited by Ralph Ginzburg and art-directed by Herb Lubalin.

These are the most common typefaces in the database, but there are many more.

Haas Inserat-Grotesk / Neue Aurora VIII (43).

“A Brief History of Avant Garde” Thinking For a Living. 13 July 2009. I would say if you are going to use Avant Garde, use it in a situation where an idea being presented is new, exciting, and different. Designers like it a lot, as well as indie bands, artists, etc. All of those descriptions were in mind when the typeface was designed, making it a very popular font for un-ordinary or new and confident things. The term “avant garde” is usually used in the arts meaning unorthodox, experimental, or futuristic. However, when used correctly, the font’s name itself describes how it should be used. Not many fonts have so much attention-to-detail when it comes to how the letters actually work together, so this is why Avant Garde has such high remarks in the design world.Īs I mentioned before, Avant Garde is misused sometimes due to people not understanding how the letters should work together. The collection of special ligatures also is what makes this typeface so cutting-edge. A lot like Futura, one will see straight stems with circular bowls, however Avant Garde takes another step further into the geometric realm and creates hard angles that line up in all the letter forms. They claimed that designers did’t use their ligatures correctly, and when their magnificent font was misused it was said that Avant Garde became merely “Futura-esque looking with some flaws.”Īvant Garde is a sans-serif geometric typeface designed with perfection and futurism in mind. When this happened, the design team started to notice the misuse immediately. This left designers with the most basic version without the “perfect” design elements that were originally in the display type. It was a sad moment in type history when Avant Garde went digital and the only version they decided to digitize was the text copy. The display version had many ligatures and special characters, while the design for text copy dropped all of these bonuses. Originally, there were two designs of ITC Avant Garde, one being for the sole purpose of display, and the other for text copy.

The typeface was originally meant to be for the purpose of the logo of the magazine only, however the director of the magazine though the design was so futuristic, well recognized, and perfectly fit, he wanted it to be commissioned to be developed as an actual font. In 1975, a designer named Herb Lubalin created this typeface for the Avant Garde magazine. This font was a breakthrough for typefaces everywhere, taking letters where they have never been before. Perfection is hard to achieve sometimes, but the guys who designed Avant Garde came very close.

Avantgarde typeface