If the font has a width axis, then you can widen or narrow the letters without seeing the distortions in shape and stroke width that appear when you simply stretch or squeeze the type. ![]() The point is that the typeface designer creates those master designs at the ends of the axis, and determines just how the letter shapes will change as the slider is dragged. The technology behind this is more complicated (and the possibilities are really quite sophisticated), but it’s easy to see how it works in practice. ![]() The slider is moving along the font’s “axis” there’s a different version of the letter at each end of the axis (Extra Fat at one end, say, and Really Thin at the other), and as you drag the slider along the axis you can create any variation in between those two extremes. As you drag the slider, the letterform you’re looking at morphs: from fat to thin, for instance, or from condensed to expanded, depending on how it was designed to change. Multiple master technology, which in the early ’90s was the Next Big Thing, is notoriously hard to explain in words and static images, but wonderfully easy to demonstrate by dragging a slider back and forth onscreen. Now ITC Avant Garde is the first ITC typeface to be issued as a multiple master Type 1 typeface.” (See Figure 1.)įigure 1: Multiple master technology could create almost infinite variations of a typeface. Because of its large x-height, extensive set of alternative and ligatured characters and strong design personality, the face also broke new stylistic ground for typeface creation. It began as Herb Lubalin’s logo for the always innovative, and often controversial magazine, “ Avant Garde.” It then became the first typeface released by ITC when the company was founded in 1970. The text of the 1993 “U&lc” ad is of course marketing copy, but it accurately places the typeface in its context: “Throughout its 25-year life, ITC Avant Garde has lived up to its name by continually breaking new ground. ITC Avant Garde already had a long history in graphic design, from its origins in the creatively explosive days of the late 1960s. Both fashion and technology change quickly it would be hard to say, in the digital world, which one is more transient. ![]() Looking back on it a decade later prompts all kinds of reflections about the interplay of typographic fashion and font technology. That date is almost exactly 10 years ago. ![]() It was a two-page spread announcing that, on May 17, 1993, ITC Avant Garde would be available in Adobe’s new multiple master font format. Īs I was rummaging through back issues of “ Upper & lowercase,” researching images and ideas for a forthcoming book on “U&lc” (coming next year from Mark Batty, Publisher, I came across an ad in the 20th-anniversary issue (Vol. You can find more from John at his website. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.Įventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. Dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D.
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