an essay on Herb Lubalin’s ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

Herb Lubalin was a notable American designer whose most memorable work was done in the area of type facing (White , 2005 . According to Dorfsman , he used his extraordinary talent and taste to transform words and meaning from a medium to an inextricable part of the message (Brown , 1981 . In his birthplace of New York , he left the Cooper Union in 1939 and after various jobs he soon filled the role of editorial designer at several prominent print companies . He was in charge of the Saturday Post , and was also responsible for publishing such magazines

as the 1962 Eros , the 1967 Pact , and the 1968 Avant Garde Brown , 1981 Fonts , 2005 . It was during these years as editorial designer that Lubalin 's talent for creating graphic fonts was nurtured . As editorial designer , he was responsible for much of the spatial aspects of the representation placed within the magazines , and this duty honed his designing skills as much as it created opportunities or necessities for him to produce new typefaces . Furthermore , he was also the director of editorial design for the promotional journal of the International Typeface Corporation . It was during this time that he created the ITC Avant Garde Gothic font to facilitate the melding of the design with the name of the magazine (Fonts , 2005 Pioneers ' 1999

The font ITC Avant Garde Gothic was created for the new magazine 's masthead in 1968 , and two years later it was placed on the market for use by other companies and individuals (Meggs , 1994 Snyder Peckolick 1985 . The Avant Garde magazine , which was the conception of the innovative publisher Ralph Ginzberg , who wanted to place the magazine on the cutting edge of the art , design , and publishing industry (Berry 2005 . The font chosen to represent the magazine was to be the presenting face of all this innovation . However , after numerous sketches , several problems were proving themselves insurmountable . One of the main problems was the placement of a V between two A 's . Since the magazine 's name was to be typed in upper case , this proved a very awkward placement that was inevitable for the masthead . The AVA as it was set in the fonts available at the time placed too much space between the letters and left the masthead 's appearance being too open . The white space detracted from the tightness and fitted aspect of the rest of the magazine , and it also detracted from the sharpness of the conception that Ginzberg had for the font

Realizing there was more to type than purity ' soon the creativity and ingenuity of Herb Lubalin came to his rescue (Cherpitel , 2001 . He started with the Gothic font , and manipulated this in to make it fit more with the Avant Garde magazine style (Glasser , et al , 2006 . A major step was made when he got the idea to vary the angles of the A 's and V 's so that they would be able to fit more closely together . In making the right side...