Sex, prison and lost ligatures. But fortunately the advent of OpenType technology has allowed ITC to release a complete digital version of 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 today announced the release of ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro. 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 touts this fact on their website 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 fake italics.)

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: Discussion at Typophile : ITC Avant Garde Gothic from E+F with true obliques

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Avant Garde Gothic Ligatures For Braces