Type Gallery – ITC Avant Garde Gothic
ITC Avant Garde Gothic® was designed by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase in 1970. They based it on Lubalin’s logo for Avant Garde Magazine – an exciting construction of overlapping and tightly-set geometric capitals. ITC Avant Garde is a geometric sans serif; meaning the basic shapes are constructed from circles and straight lines, much like the work from the 1920s German Bauhaus movement.
Pan-European W1G character sets of the ten weights of the regular version of Avant Garde were made available at the beginning of this year. Greek and Cyrillic characters have been supplied for all weights, so that each now consists of more than 600 glyphs and can be used to set texts in at least 89 different languages. Similar non-Roman alternatives have been created for each Roman character wherever possible, while some of the special ligatures have been transformed. Thanks to this update, designers working with Greek or Cyrillic texts can now exploit the creative range of Avant Garde to the full. Multinational organisations can use it as their corporate font and adapt their individual designs based on this for use in an even greater variety of languages.