1. Avant Garde Gothic Bold

Avant Garde is a seminal, but somewhat overlooked by a wider public, magazine, which broke taboos, rattled some nerves and made a few enemies. The magazine was the brainchild of Ralph Ginzburg, an eager and zealous publisher, even if the path that led to Avant Garde wasn’t so straightforward. It represents the third major collaboration between Ralph Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin, the magazine’s talented art director.

The two previous magazines came to unexpected demise due to their candor and provocativeness, that landed them into legal trouble.Avant Garde is the magazine that gave birth to a much maligned and equally lauded typeface of the same name. A typeface that reveled in the mutability of letterforms, exhibited brilliantly by its extensive set of ligatured characters. The magazine’s logo, which inspired the typeface, is a perfect encapsulation of what the magazine represented in 1968, the year the magazine launched: exciting, vibrant, edgy, with just the right amount of playfulness to move it out of the corporateness its geometric sans serif forms might otherwise imply. The magazine ran for 3 years, spanning 14 square-sized issues, and only folded due to Ralph Ginzburg losing his long-running legal battle with the US government over obscenity charges (partly stemming from Ralph’s and Herb’s first collaboration Eros magazine).The strong content and the inventive design of Avant Garde is a testament to a close understanding that developed between Ginzburg and Lubalin, but also of a mutual respect of the boundaries set by each side.

Ralph didn’t interfere in the design and Herb didn’t meddle in the editorial content. It’s a balance that magazines still strive for today. Avant Garde deserves a close investigation and appreciation. It still has a lot to say.— Alexander Tochilovsky. Crimes against typography are committed everyday.

But few typefaces have been victimized more than the late-sixties/early-seventies gothic Avant Garde – and the felonies persist. The reason is a surfeit of angular ligatures that offer too many cheap tricks. I know because I am a recovering Avant Garde abuser. Although I haven’t touched the stuff in almost thirty years, when the face was in its prime, I was hopelessly addicted.

Since I had the fonts on my Phototypositor I got kicks making the most flagrantly absurd ligature combinations imaginable. Nobody, not even the face’s creator Herb Lubalin, could stop me. In fact, having seen so many abominable applications by addicts like myself, I once heard Lubalin curse the day that Avant Garde was released to the public. However, the revenue stream made from font sales gives this a disingenuous ring.Avant Garde was not originally designed as a commercial typeface.

It was the logo for a magazine that its editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg explains was “a thoughtful, joyous magazine on art and politics” aimed at people “ahead of their time.” The goal of the magazine, however, was not merely to reflect the cultural zeitgeist but take a lead role in purveying raucous sixties culture.

Avant GardeCharacteristics:Geometric – A class of Sans Serif types based on Humanist Roman faces, bearing characteristics of hand-drawn forms.Ligatures – The joining of two or three separate characters to form a single unit in order to avoid interference between certain letter combinations.Gothic – Do not have the decorative touches that typify Roman typefaces and it is also called sans-serif. The absence of any serif, whilst providing a clean letterform, can impinge on the legibility of the body text.Avant Garde is about symmetrical forms, clean lines, no serif and rounded shapes. The clean and simple design makes the font ideal for display texts, but may make it difficult to read in long passages.In the mid-1960’s, New York design legend Herb Lubalin developed a unique logo for a new culture magazine titled Avant Garde. Lubalin’s mark for the magazine was a study in geometry, with angular forms perfectly spaced to rest tightly against one another. When a full alphabet was needed for promotional materials, Lubalin and three assistants drew a complete uppercase alphabet. Tom Carnase, one of Lubalin’s partners and frequent collaborator, was brought in to the project, resulting in the creation of many additional hand-fitted character pairs, the ligatures that gave the design its completely original style.The font family consists of 5 weights (4 for condensed), with complementary obliques for widest width fonts.

Avant Garde Gothic Bold

The stronger characters of this font are the letter G (with the tail, rather than the double-storey), and the letter A (perfectly rounded and symmetric).BibliographyFONT – Classic Typefaces for Contemporary Graphic Design by Tamye Riggs with James Grieshaber, 2009Basics Design: TYPOGRAPHY by Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris, 2005.