the adventures of teapot the cat

Avant Garde Gothic Pro + Alternates

Posted on December 31st, 2005

This typeface and it’s famous ligatures have seen a huge resurgence in popularity lately, and can be found all over the place (I see it use a lot in design coming from the UK). Elsner+Flake had made the Avant Garde Gothic Pro and Alternates (Ligatures) available in digital form first, and ITC has recently released an Opentype version.

Some examples of Avant Garde Gothic Alternates | More

From graphic-design.com: Avant Garde — the typeface — was born as a logo for a new magazine of the same name in the mid-60s. Ralph Ginzburg collaborated with Herb Lubalin (pronounced “Loo-ba-lin”) on four magazines, of which Avant Garde was their second. Ginzburg remembers, “Avant Garde (the magazine) began as the single most difficult collaboration we had — his [Lubalin's] first logo was in Hebrew. He thought that was funny. Then he did it in Coca-Cola script. We went through a dozen logos, masterfully executed.”

Graphic Design Publishing - Herb Lubalin’s Avant Garde Lubalin and Ginzburg used a collection of Picasso erotica in the promotional materials for the new magazine and needed a complete alphabet for their titles. Lubalin used three assistants to hand draw the 26 characters (only capital letters were needed) very quickly and, with the vital involvement of Tom Carnase, another of Lubalin’s partners, many additional fitted character pairs (called “ligatures”) were created as their work progressed. It is these upper case character pairs that made Avant Garde one of the most original typefaces of the twentieth century. But Avant Garde, the all-cap typeface, was intended only for use in the magazine by its art director.

Entry Filed under: Other