ITC Avant Garde


ITC Avant Garde Gothic is a geometric sans serif 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, Erich Gschwind and 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 five weights, 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.

Cold Type versions

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.

Digital versions

ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro

It is an OpenType variant of the original ITC Avant Garde Gothic, plus a suite of additional cap and lowercase alternates, new ligatures, unicase glyphs. It supports ISO Adobe 2, Adobe CE, Latin Extended character sets.
In addition, the obliques are altered from the original, where optical corrections are no longer used.

ITC Avant Garde Mono

It is a monospaced version designed by Ned Bunnel in 1983.
Digital version was produced by Elsner+Flake. The family consists of 4 fonts in 2 weights in 1 width, with complementary italics.

William Sans LET

William Sans LET is a very similar font, but the "regular" typeface is known as "Plain 1.0".

Derivatives

is a slab-serif version of ITC Avant Garde, also designed by Lubalin.

Uses

Miscellaneous