Avant Garde Gothic, Now With Ligatures
In the late 1960s, designer Herb Lubalin was commissioned to design a striking geometric logotype for Avant Garde magazine. He and Tom Carnase (both partners in Lubalin Smith Carnase) created a body font and a headline font, notable for its unprecedent number of custom-fitted, hand-drawn ligatures. The font was a hit, and has transcended its “1970s” connotations to become a genuine classic.
Avant Garde made the leap to digital in the early days of desktop publishing, but ASCII character-set standards of the day didn’t have enough room for all of the headline font’s extra ligatures - so we’ve only had the plainer book version for the last 20 years. Designers who wanted access to all those extra tasty bits had to either scan old specimen books or redraw them by hand.
This month, the full, complete set of Avant Garde headline fonts has finally been reissued in OpenType format. It took OpenType for this to happen - because it can have as many as 65,000 character shapes (or glyphs) in a single font, vs. an upper limit of 256 glyphs in PostScript fonts.
Prediction: Many, many album covers imitating Travis’ “The Man Who.”
November 10, 2005 4:34 PM
Comments
Yikes, have you seen what they did [or didn’t bother to do] with the italics? There is a nice explanation and sample over at Typographi.com
wrote Corey on December 17, 2005 8:28 PM
Hi Corey, thanks for the comment.
Yeah, the obliques seem to leave something to be desired…then again I think obliquing a geometric sans like this is a bit pointless, it’s like retrofitting serifs onto Univers. A proper italic needs a humanist or Renaissance font to begin with, it really emulates the tilt of handwriting. There’s very few serif fonts with good italics to begin with - most of them are afterthoughts, bastardized mergers of two different historical designs. But that’s just my opinion ;)
wrote AJ Kandy on December 21, 2005 3:45 AM
Now, this is good design…
Considering my own design, I guess I’m bound to think so.. =) So why not go on to discuss content… Which is superb as well! How do you do it..? =)
wrote Jørgen Arnor Gårdsø Lom on November 13, 2005 8:00 PM