ITC Avant Garde Gothic
Some typophiles trace ITC Avant Garde Gothic’s design heritage to the geometric sans serifs produced by Bauhaus designers in the mid-1920s. Actually, the design has its foundation in the first sanserif ever produced: a cap-only face issued by the Caslon Type Foundry in 1816. The characters in this design set the standard for the basic geometric shapes found not only in Avant Garde Gothic but also in virtually every geometric sans serif produced since 1816.
The original design, used for Avant Garde magazine, only had capital letters. Avant Garde Gothic was one of the first two text and display typeface families released by ITC. The other was ITC Souvenir.
ITC Newtext
When the copperplate gothics became popular in the first decade of the twentieth century, they were available in several weights, in italics and even in a shaded version. They were not, however, cast with a lowercase alphabet. This is not so unusual in that the fonts were made to mimic copperplate engraving – which also seldom used lowercase roman letters.
Ray Baker took the concept of copperplate gothics and added to it. He built every design refinement that could sharpen the usefulness of Newtext. A lowercase was just the first step. The expanded shapes give the letters a generous feeling of legibility, and the economical vertical can result in more lines to the page. Newtext’s wide proportions and small, but sturdy, serifs also insure high levels of readability at small sizes.