In the late 1970s, while Ed Benguiat was working at the design studio of Herb Lubalin, a friend asked Benguiat to design a logo for a store the friend was opening. Benguiat created hundreds of trial drawings for the logo before his friend finally made his choice.
Benguiat had become enamored of the lettershapes he had drawn mid-way through the project, so he continued to draw additional characters. After some time, Lubalin finally declared that this doodling was taking up too much of Benguiat’s time at the studio. But Benguiat felt he had the makings of a typeface and assembled a formal design submission for the ITC Review Board. After three rounds of submissions, the ITC Review Board agreed and, in 1977, the ITC Benguiat® typeface family was released.
At first glance, ITC Benguiat has strong art nouveau overtones. A closer look reveals much more: definite oldstyle traits, short, heavily-bracketed serifs that are almost Latin in design and even a hint of chancery script. While many typefaces fit neatly into a design category, ITC Benguiat won’t be forced into a tidy typographic box. It’s much too lively a design.
Ed Benguiat has drawn more than 600 typefaces – possibly more than any other type designer. With so many typefaces to his credit, he is often asked to explain how he goes about developing a new design. Over the years he has tried to answer this question by using numerous analogies. He has likened the process to composing music, designing fashion and even to establishing a romantic relationship. In the end, however, the answer is always the same: “It’s not easy,” says Benguiat, “there is no magic formula, and there is no replacement for hard work.”
Clearly, there was no magic formula for pleasing Benguiat’s choosy shop-owner friend, but the trained eye of the master type designer – and a lot of hard work – resulted in one of ITC’s most enduring typeface families.
To keep this time-tested design in tune with today’s technology, the ITC Benguiat family is newly available as a suite of OpenType Pro fonts. Graphic communicators can now work with this versatile design while taking advantage of OpenType’s capabilities, including the automatic insertion of old style figures, small caps, and a bevy of ligatures.
The new ITC Benguiat Pro fonts also offer an extended character set that supports most Central European and many Eastern European languages.