| Date: 1970 Designer:
Herb Lubalin / Tom Carnase / Ed Benguiat Foundry:
ITC Location:
New York, USA Current equivalent:
ITC Avant Garde Gothic See also: URW Gothic Technologies:
Digital Photosetting
Postscript
Truetype
Opentype | | Famous for:
Updated geometric sans serif design. Applications: Advertising and Display Ubiquity:
Very widely used Category:
Sans Serif Geometric Stress: Vertical
Serifs: Sans Serif | | Design history:
The first typeface released by ITC, Avant Garde was based on Futura, and derived from the masthead of Avant Garde magazine, which had been handlettered by Herb Lubalin. Lubalin's style was to space headlines very tightly and build in complex ligatures to the modern letterforms. He and Aaron Burns founded ITC the previous year; ITC was not a type foundry in the conventional sense – it existed to license and distribute type, and had a pronounced effect on the market during the 1970s and 1980s. Avant Garde's distinguishing mark is the unclosed bowl on the uppercase 'R'. Italics and supplementary weights were added later by Tom Carnase and Ed Benguiat. | |  |
