Ed Benguiat loves to draw letters. When he’s not creating a new typeface, he can usually be found working on a piece of hand-lettering or a logo design for one of his hundreds of clients. The addiction is pervasive: in restaurants he sketches new alphabets on napkins, in business meetings he doodles in Spencerian cursive, and his greeting cards are always hand-lettered works of art.
Benguiat (pronounced BEN-gat) has drawn more than six hundred typefaces, possibly more than any other type designer. His work includes faces for International Typeface Corporation, PhotoLettering Inc., and for corporate clients such as AT&T and The New York Times. Some of his designs are revivals of old metal faces; these include ITC Souvenir and ITC Bookman Others, like ITC Panache, are completely original. And long before sophisticated type manipulation software was available, Benguiat was creating new typefaces by “sampling” features of existing designs. ITC Tiffany and ITC Barcelona are both examples of his ability to take design traits from existing typefaces and meld them into a new design.
An Early Start
Born in Brooklyn, Benguiat was the son of a display director at Bloomingdale’s who made his pens, brushes, and drafting sets available to his son at an early age. Benguiat’s innate design talent was demonstrated when he graduated from high school and successfully forged a photostat of his birth certificate, which he used to join the armed forces during World War II. The color-blind recruit then cheated on a vision test by memorizing the correct answers in advance, and Benguiat was accepted into the Air Corps.
When he returned to civilian life, Benguiat followed his first professional dream: to be a musician. He earned a degree in music from Brooklyn College and began to work professionally as a big band drummer. “I played with Stan Kenton and Woody Herman,” he recalls, “on what was then called ‘Swing Street’ in New York.”
Even a good drummer could be out of work more often than not, however, so when his parents emphatically suggested that he become some other kind of artist, Benguiat enrolled in the Workshop School with the intention of becoming an illustrator. His first break as a lettering artist was basically a fluke. “I was working at a studio doing photo touch-up. The person responsible for lettering got sick and the studio needed a lettering job done,” he recalls. “I said I could do it. I figured I could do anything, until somebody told me different. I did the job, and I’ve been drawing letters ever since.”
Simple Wisdom
In the thirty years Benguiat has taught at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University, thousands of students have been exposed to his wit, charm, and extraordinary talent as an interpreter of letterforms. Many found inspiration in Benguiat’s love of letters and have gone on to build typographic careers of their own.
Benguiat is not a complex man, but he is very wise. He knows what makes him happy, he knows his skills, and he is absolutely true to his ideals. He works hard at his craft. Even at a time in life when others would be content to rest on their laurels, Benguiat continues to do what he loves.
Typefaces by Ed Benguiat
ITC Barcelona
ITC Benguiat
Benguiat Frisky (available from fonts.com)
ITC Benguiat Gothic
ITC Bookman
ITC Caslon No. 224
ITC Century Handtooled
ITC Cheltenham Handtooled
ITC Edwardian Script
ITC Garamond Handtooled
ITC Modern No. 216
ITC Panache
ITC Souvenir
ITC Tiffany
Collaborations
ITC Avant Garde Gothic
ITC Bauhaus
ITC Korinna
ITC Lubalin Graph