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Avant Garde
Herb Lubalin's archetypal design for Avant Garde surely ranks as one of the most striking and influential logotypes ever created for a magazine. Now, ITC has released Avant Garde Gothic Pro, with all the original ligatures and alternate characters never before available in digital form, as well as many extras - all in super-smart OpenType format.
View Avant Garde Gothic, including it extensive character set and type samples
More about Avant Garde Gothic
Avant Garde Gothic was created in the late 1960s for a new magazine conceived by the forward-thinking publisher and editor Ralph Ginzburg. The publication was to be called, fittingly, Avant Garde. Herb Lubalin, the magazine’s art director, made several sketches for the logo, but none, fully captured the radical sense that Ginzburg sought.
Finally, Lubalin devised a solution that proved nothing short of historic, typographically speaking. He took gothic caps and altered the angles of the A and V so the V tucked tightly in between the two As of AVANT. The right stem of the second A and the left stem of the N joined forces, and the right stem of the N became part of the T. For GARDE, he layered the circular G with the angular A, and the D and E were combined into a ligature. Every spare molecule of air was sucked out of the letter-spacing until the logo became a dynamic block of angles, lines and curves that still, miraculously, read as Avant Garde. What’s more, it could be moved as a unit around the cover, appearing anywhere the cover design dictated.
Ginzburg approved the design, and Lubalin turned his rough sketch over to lettering artist and type designer Tom Carnase, his partner at Lubalin Smith Carnase. Carnase rendered the final form and designed additional characters and ligatures to set the headline for each department of the magazine. Soon there were nearly enough characters to complete an entire alphabet, and Avant Garde Gothic was born.
There were two original designs of ITC Avant Garde Gothic: one for setting headlines and one for text copy. The differences between the two were subtle, but the display design contained ligatures and alternate characters and the text design did not. When Avant Garde Gothic was turned into a digital font, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included.
Now, OpenType technology has allowed ITC to release a complete version of Avant Garde Gothic, offering the full breadth of Lubalin and Carnase’s design – all the original alternate characters and ligatures, plus many extras. Avant Garde Gothic Pro includes a suite of additional cap and lowercase alternates, new ligatures that were drawn just for this release, and a collection of biform characters (lowercase letters with cap proportions). The original design contained a suite of thirty-three alternate characters and logotypes; the new design more than doubles this number. Best of all, OpenType technology is smart enough to use these characters when and where you direct it to.
In addition to English, the new Avant Garde Gothic Pro fonts support most European and many Central European languages, including Baltic, Turkish, Czech, Hungarian and Polish. Fonts can be purchased individually or as a complete ITC Avant Garde Gothic Family Package.
View Avant Garde Gothic, including its extensive character set and type samples, in this PDF 
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