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.
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.
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.
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.