Ain’t What ITC Used to. Ain’t what Avant Garde Gothic used to be. Get on the ball and release Pro versions of Avant Garde with all the ligatures and. Jun 14, 2014. Originally, there were two designs of ITC Avant Garde, one being for the sole purpose of display, and the other for text copy. The display version had many ligatures and special characters, while the design for text copy dropped all of these bonuses. It was a sad moment in type history when Avant Garde.

Showings of Avant Garde Gothic family including variants and ligatures designed by Herb Lubalin Letraset Technical Manual (1981) Type faces catalogue, STL Industries Pty Ltd (Melbourne) A short rant Adobe Avant Garde first appeared among the LaserWriter Plus ROM fonts and was released as a font package at about the same time. Interestingly, ITC had long maintained their library in digital format (URW IKARUS), which may have greased the wheels of Adobe's early type releases.

(Although at that time, automated conversion from IK to Type 1 would probably not have been done.) Unfortunately the Adobe version of Avant Garde differs in many ways from the original drawing. • The circular zero became a lozenge shape because Adobe required, somewhat artificially, that their fonts have tabular (equal width) digits. (This is, of course, quite the wrong choice for the bulk of typesetting: headings and running text. Tables are relatively exceptional.) • Likewise, the alternate sorts and ligatures had no place in the Procrustean AdobeStandardEncoding to which the Adobe library conformed.

That encoding allows only two ligatures - fi, fl - which in many Adobe releases were not even authentic! • The Univers ampersand is another sorry example. Frutiger's original design apparently had a little too much 'character' for the digitising committee, and it was replaced with a completely differentglyph: In blunders such as these, and many others, Adobe fumbled early opportunities to bring the full richness of typographic tradition into the PostScript Age. Microsoft Office 2003 Norwegian Breakaway.

Instead, the policy was evidently to regularise wherever possible in shapes, character sets and weights. No doubt the memory constraints of the earliest interpreters helped rationalise some compromises. The software and hardware was designed to handle the saleable bread-and-butter of office correspondence and fancy word processing - later dubbed 'desktop publishing'. These shortcuts did little to convince the graphic arts high-end that their typographic products paid more than lip service to quality and tradition. What else is around here • • Telegraphics' (including free downloads) • Telegraphics' (and other software).

Ain’t What ITC Used to Be Written by Mark Simonson on October 4, 2005 ITC today announced the release of. The good news is that this is a family of full-featured OpenType fonts. It has all the usual goodies that implies — extended language support and OpenType features. Even better news is that they have reinstated all the ligatures, logotypes, and alternate characters that made Avant Garde famous in the first place. They also added a bunch of new ones, though some of them are a bit questionable, like the Celtic-style E. Overall, they did an okay job of it. I was disappointed, however, to see that they took a huge short cut on the italics: they simply slanted the upright version, in spite of the fact that ITC designed and released optically correct obliques in 1977.

Ironically, ITC while displaying a simply-slanted version on the same page. Here is what the 1977 version looked like: This is the version that Bitstream used to sell before ITC cancelled many of its distribution agreements after it was acquired by Agfa Monotype a few years ago. Here is the new Pro version: (To understand why simply slanting a font doesn’t work, see my article on.) The ITC brand used to be one of the most respected in the type business. When they cut corners like they’ve done with Avant Garde Gothic Pro, you wonder if they understand why they were so respected. See also:: of Saint Paul, Minnesota is a former art director and graphic designer who now makes his living — are Typographica selections. Mark and co: You are absolutely right. Slanting is not tilting–it is sliding the character sideways: horizontal strokes remain horizontal.

If you take an upright rectangle, we know from high school math that the ink used in it is equal to base times height. That remains true if you “slant” it.

So all mechanically slanted characters use the same amount of ink as the original ones! But since they are elongated, the strokes will mostly appear thinner (except possibly in places that are counter-angled, like the southwest and northeast corners of an O). Your web site explains this beautifully! But there is a second thing, as important, if not more so, than slanting–alignment. Look at the endings of the C and e in Mark’s word “Cage”. They should be more vertically aligned than what one would get from slanting. The Monotype version is just awful.

Car magazine is probably the best in automotive writing. They have been using someone’s version of the Avant Garde alternates in their callouts for several months now if not over a year. (They also use some rather nice Font Bureau family for the body copy I forget exactly which one.) I still have the Linotype GX CD that contained some nice GX/AAT versions of the Regular and Demi weights with obliques, as well as GX versions of the rest of the Standard Postscript 35. Including the, er, indispensible Century Schoolbook-Schoolbook. The Lumberjack Song (lead) Oh I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay I sleep all night and I work all day (chorus) Oh he’s a lumberjack and he’s okay He sleeps all night an’ he works all day (lead) I cut down trees I wear high heels Suspenders and a bra I wish I’d bin a girlie Just like my dear papa (chorus) He cuts down trees He wears[etc] sung to tune of old panto.

Disclaimer: The Lumberjack Song written by Cleese, Jones, Palin et al, and not yours truly. Hrant, I don’t think AG should have an italic or an oblique. Slanted forms are fundamentally antithetical to geometric linear romans. Like tits on a bull—it can be done, but how practical or useful is the result?

Does anybody really care? Not enuff to protest these things being done in the first place.

Taste is the love of beauty in all its forms. Not that obliquing is always the solution, but it works well with such a face. Just look at other Geometric Sans Serifs, like Futura or Avenir Obliquing works okay for Futura and Avenir (itself based on Futura) due to their tall stems.

Whereas Avant Garde, no, sorry, it doesn’t have enuff verticality to make any kind of slanting treatment successful. There is no right or wrong in fashion, only in or out. When tight typography was done with care, it could be quite beautiful, drawing attention to the shapes and character of the letters. You can see this looking at Herb Lubalin’s work in U&lc.

During the seventies. A word could be transformed into a graphic expression. No doubt legibility took a back seat, but legibility is often trumped by style when you are trying to create a dramatic visual impression. I also think tight typography was a reaction to the spacing limitations of metal type. Once phototype took over, the old restrictions were gone and people went crazy, setting type in ways that were previously impossible. (I believe this same sort of thing happened again in the nineties with grunge type.) In the end, the novelty wore off and the fashions changed. And, because it went out of style, it has regained a certain amount of novelty appeal, so you do see it used now and then.

I don’t think it will ever be as popular again as it was in the seventies, though. Pokemon Heart Gold Rom Freeze Patch Desmume Controls. Do you really think that using the Bitstream version of Avant Garde is fair? The designers at Bitstream spent a great deal of time building a library of fonts that they thought needed ‘fixing’ because of the problems created by the foundries and the restrictive proprietary technologies they used to deliver typography/typesetters to the market. The Bitstream version of Avant Garde is a result of this thinking and its not true to the original ITC release, at least not the obliques. Personally, I don’t have much use for obliquing but ‘back then’ it was considered acceptable. Remember, people didn’t search for a font on a 100 gig disk, they tried to squeeze as many fonts as they could onto an 8 inch floppy. I realize that the obliqued Avant Gardes take up as much space as the uprights but the decision to oblique had to have been colored by the times.

I do think that the typographic community, as it exists today, owes a great deal to organizations like ITC, who paved the way for all of us. >I do think that the typographic community, as it exists today, owes a great deal to organizations like ITC, who paved the way for all of us. I feel that’s why so many of us take issue with the decision.

Remember, originally ITC developed and marketed typeface designs, licensed and provided font manufacturers with analog art work. It was individual font manufacturers that created film fonts and later digitized versions of ITC typefaces. That is why there had been subtle to grotesque variations of output from vendors fonts. ITC and the type industry in general are no longer in the same game as it was played during the early 1970s to 1999. ITC is now in the business of selling fonts and have a completely different market focus. They are no longer an organization that servers the entire industry. If you are referencing the type “industry,” you are probably correct; ITC does not provide its new designs to the traditional type foundries.

I would have to argue, however, that the type industry is really more of a type “community.” If you mean the “industry” of graphic communicators, then ITC clearly has the same goals it did in the 70s and 80s. ITC worked with foundries and manufactures in the 70s and 80s to get its typefaces in the hands of graphic designers. They were the ultimate users of ITC’s typefaces. Providing the typefaces to foundries and manufactures was a means to an end. The more graphic communicators that used and wanted ITC typefaces, the more typehouses bought fonts containing ITC typefaces – which provided a revenue stream to ITC.

It’s doing the same thing today; it’s just that the graphic designers now have the fonts. The great thing about the Avant Garde typeface with all its alternates was the scope it gave to art directors and graphic designers to play around, enriching their involvement with the process of typography, making it fun to set type. That will be possible with the new OT version, I expect (haven’t had the opportunity to try it), by selectively applying different features in the OT palette, or working with the Glyph palette. However, OT won’t do all the work for a layout like this, some snipping splicing still required. Well, that’s a shame. Ever since Open Type fonts were available for purchase, I’ve been wondering if ITC would ever get on the ball and release Pro versions of Avant Garde with all the ligatures and alternates, and it’s seemed like they’ve taken forever. I reasoned that maybe they were taking the extra care to polishing up the whole family of type and preparing for a major release of a legendary typeface, but it looks like they just phoned it in.

It’s too bad, because I’m sure if Avant Garde were another foundry’s hands, this OTF release would not have been treated so sloppily. It seems to me that Dr Peter Karow may be in a unique position to do something about this, as he produced and licensed to ITC the software (IKARUS) that greatly aided optical obliquing when this face was produced. He may be sufficiently offended, and certainly has the contacts, to make this right. Anyone on this list care to point him to the problem?

Failing that, a professional boycott of everything Linotype appears quite justified. Adding to the offense is that many *new* faces ship with properly designed obliques. There can really be no justification for the error here. We have already had to live with the awful PostScript cut since the LaserWriter Plus.