Avant Garde Gothic 75 pt

Avant Garde Gothic 75 pt

Avant Garde Gothic 75 pt

2

Avant Garde Gothic Medium 150 pt

Avant Garde Gothic 50 pt

Avant Garde Gothic is a font family based on the logo font used in the Avant Garde mag-azine.

Herb Lubalin devised the logo concept and its companion head-line typeface, then he and Tom Carnase, a partner in Lubalin’s design firm, worked to-gether 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. How-ever, in the initial digi-tization, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included.

The font family consists of 5 weights (4 for con-densed), with comple-mentary obliques for widest width fonts.

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

Elsner+Flake also is-sued the ligatures and alternate characters separately as Avant Garde Gothic Alter-nate.

Avant Garde Gothic Book 14 pt5

Avant Garde Gothic Book 14 pt

Avant Garde Gothic’s anatomy consists of: a few unusual and unex-pected characteristics. These characteristics consist of the bowl of the R remaining un-clodes, but the bowl of the P is closed,

the curve on the top of the Q reaches across the whole letter,

a low crossbar on G,

abbreviated descen-dants (esp. g)

and rectangular dots obove the lowercase i and j.

A distinctive geomet-ric display face, which Lubalin said should be set very tight. A good version comes with a number of unusual uppercase ligatures. The face retains some of the flavor of the late sixties/early seventies.

PR

QG

gy

i jA

van

t Ga

rde

Go

thic

De

mi 1

00 p

t

6

7

“The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde.” -- Ed Benguiat

“For use in extensive text the font’s rigid, uniform strokes will cre-ate eye problems right away. Additionally, the perfect circles in the round characters be-gin to form light spots or ‘holes’ in the text that disturb the calm texture of columns of type.” -- “Fred”

“This is a bicameral stick-and-ball san-serif with very large x-height.” -- Robert Bringhurst

“The world’s most abused typeface.” -- Tony DiSpigna, a partner of Lubalin

“A collection of such extreme shapes causes fatigue at text sizes and cannot help but draw attention to itself, which is arguably the greatest sin a type-face can commit.” -- Alix W. White

Avant Garde Gothic Book 14 pt

Avant Garde Gothic M

edium 150 pt

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Avant Garde Gothic is a widely ridiculed typeface, being almost impossible to search anything good any-body has said about it in the past.

Many seem to ridi-cule it for it’s repetitive straight and even lines with it’s perfectly circu-lar negative gaps in letters such as O which apparently create holes in the body text.

Even though there has been all of this ridi-cule about how Avant Garde Gothic only works for the words ‘Avant Garde,’ it must be a pretty successful typeface.

It ranks at number 23 on the 100 best type-faces list and has been successfully used by Mobil gas and even more successfully by the worldwide famous althetic ware brand adidas.

Avant Garde Gothic Book 14 pt