ITC Avant Garde

ITC Avant Garde
Category Sans-serif
Classification Geometric sans-serif
Designer(s) Herb Lubalin, Tom Carnase
Foundry International Typeface Corporation
Date released 1970-1977

ITC Avant Garde Gothic is a font family based on the logo font used in the Avant Garde magazine. Herb Lubalin devised the logo concept and its companion headline typeface, and then he and Tom Carnase, a partner in Lubalin's design firm, worked together to transform the idea into a full-fledged typeface.

The condensed fonts were drawn by Ed Benguiat in 1974, and the obliques were designed by André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt in 1977.

The original designs include one version for setting headlines and one for text copy. However, in the initial digitization, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included.

The font family consists of 5 weights (4 for condensed), with complementary obliques for widest width fonts.

When ITC released the OpenType version of the font, the original 33 alternate characters and ligatures, plus extra characters were included.

Elsner+Flake also issued the ligatures and alternate characters separately as Avant Garde Gothic Alternate.

Cold Type versions

ITC Avant Garde was never cast into actual foundry type, appearing first only in cold type. Alphatype, Autologic, Berthold, Compugraphic, Dymo, Star/Photon, Harris, Mergenthaler, MGD Graphic Systems, and Varityper all sold the face under the name Avant Garde, while Graphic Systems Inc. offered the face as Suave.[1]

Digital versions

ITC Avant Garde Std

It is an OpenType version sold by Adobe. The font family consists of 5 weights, with complementary obliques for all weights and widths. It supports Adobe Western 2 character set. However, the alternate characters, ligatures (except linguistic), and extra characters found in the ITC fonts are not included.

ITC Avant Garde Multilingual

It is a version with Cyrillic support from ParaType. Cyrillic glyphs were developed at ParaType (ParaGraph) in 1993 by Vladimir Yefimov. Alternates and ligatures were added in 2008 by Olga Umpeleva.

The family consists of 4 fonts in 2 weights (book and demi) in 1 width, with complementary obliques.

ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro

It is an OpenType variant of the original ITC Avant Garde Gothic, plus a suite of additional cap and lowercase alternates, new ligatures, unicase glyphs. It supports ISO Adobe 2, Adobe CE, Latin Extended character sets.

In addition, the obliques are altered from the original, where optical corrections are no longer used.[2]

ITC Avant Garde Mono

It is a monospaced version designed by Ned Bunnel in 1983.

Digital version was produced by Elsner+Flake. The family consists of 4 fonts in 2 weights (bold and light) in 1 width, with complementary italics.

William Sans LET

William Sans LET is a very similar font, but the "regular" typeface is known as "Plain 1.0".

Selected usage

The Macy's logo uses a variant of ITC Avant Garde Gothic

Derivatives

ITC Lubalin Graph is a slab-serif version of ITC Avant Garde, also designed by Lubalin.[3]

Similar

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lawson, Alexander, Archie Provan, and Frank Romano, Primer Metal Typeface Identification, National Composition Association, Arlington, Virginia, 1976, pp. 34 - 35.
  2. ↑ Ain't What ITC Used to Be
  3. ↑ ITC Lubalin Graph Font Family - by Herb Lubalin, Ed Benguiat
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