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.Īvant Garde was not originally designed as a commercial typeface. 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 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. A typeface that reveled in the mutability of letterforms, exhibited brilliantly by its extensive set of ligatured characters. Avant Garde is the magazine that gave birth to a much maligned and equally lauded typeface of the same name.
