Unlike BetaMax and 8-track tapes, OpenType is a technology that is here to stay. In fact, in time, every font you use will probably be of the Open- Type variety. The good news is that you don’t need to get all new fonts right now. If you are happy with the way your current fonts perform, you can continue to use and purchase the older flavors of PostScript and TrueType. If, however, you want more typographic capability or the ability to customize your headlines, you may want to consider adding a few OpenType fonts to your typographic palette.

While Adobe Systems has converted its complete type offering to OpenType, until recently relatively few fonts have pushed the envelope of this technology (Adobe, along with Microsoft, are codevelopers of the technology). Now more and more typeface designers are taking full advantage of OpenType’s features—and graphic designers are reaping the benefit. Following is a sampling of just some of these “super” OpenType fonts.

OLD MADE NEW
AVANT GARDE GOTHIC
Avant Garde Gothic has been around since the late 1960s. It was first used as the logo for a new magazine by the publisher and poet Ralph Ginzburg. Herb Lubalin, the art director for the publication, showed several sketches for the logo to Ginzburg but none captured the concept of the magazine—to be called AVANT GARDE. Finally, for his historic solution, Lubalin adapted gothic caps and changed the angles of the A and V so they fit together like a wedge of pie. He angularized the second A so that its right stem was parallel with the left of the N and halved the T so that half of it was part of the N. The perfectly round G carved into the angular A in GARDE and the D/E combination was made into a ligature. Both words were tightly letterspaced to be perfectly stacked, and thus could fit as a block anywhere on the cover.

Lubalin turned his rough sketch over to type designer Tom Carnase, his partner at Lubalin Smith Carnase, who rendered the final form. Since Lubalin wanted all department heads for the magazine to be consistent with the logo, Carnase designed additional characters and created more ligatures. After making a handful of these headlines, he realized there were almost enough characters to complete an entire alphabet—and Avant Garde Gothic was born.

ITC Avant Garde Gothic is not a particularly distinctive face— something between Futura and Helvetica—but its ligatures and alternate characters captured the imagination of art directors and graphic designers, who used them with glee. Fonts sold like donuts at a police convention and Avant Garde was used to set everything from diner menus to annual reports.

Originally, there were two designs of ITC Avant Garde Gothic: one for setting headlines and one for text copy. The diÙerence between the two was subtle—except that the display design contained the ligatures and alternate characters, and the text design did not. When it came time to make digital fonts, however, only the text design was chosen—so long ligatures, arrivederci alternates.

OpenType has allowed ITC to, once again, release an allsinging, all-dancing version of Avant Garde Gothic—and graphic designers can once again take advantage of the full breadth of Lubalin and Carnese’s design. All the original alternate characters and ligatures have been made available, plus more than a few extras have been added to the mix. A gaggle of additional cap and lowercase alternates, and more ligatures were drawn along with a suite of biform characters (lowercase letters with cap proportions). And the OpenType technology is smart enough to put them in the right place when you instruct it to do so. Like the original, this is not a design for lengthy text copy. But, if a striking headline is your goal, this just may be the OpenType font to use.

GARAMOND PREMIER PRO
Robert Slimbach drew Adobe Garamond in the late 1980s. The design is a somewhat modern interpretation of Claude Garamond’s original type but, like many of the early designs from Adobe, it is a little “homogenized” and lacks some of the personality of the original. Fortunately, Slimbach saved his sketches and has used them as the basis for another Garamond interpretation— one that better captures the original’s unique personality and range of point sizes.

In metal type, virtually each point size of a given typestyle had subtly diÙerent proportions. In serif typefaces, for example, the thin parts of a character were proportionally heavier as the point size decreases. The lowercase x-height is also generally larger in text sizes than in display designs, and serifs are more pronounced. In addition, intercharacter spacing is more open in text faces. All of this is to optimize the type at the size it will be used.

When font foundries began making phototype versions of metal typefaces, the overwhelming trend was to produce just one design that would be used at all point sizes. This made the production of fonts easier and dramatically reduced the price of owning a reasonably large typeface library. Most traditional text designs— for example, Garamond—were based on original text drawings or typeset samples of one size. This meant that they performed well at the size they were originally intended, but not so well at other sizes. The first digital fonts took this same design shortcut.

By modeling Garamond Premier Pro on Claude Garamond’s hand-cut type sizes, Slimbach was able to retain the varied optical size characteristics and much of the freshness of the original designs. This new Garamond is oÙered in five weights ranging from light to bold. The family also contains four “optical” design sizes: Caption, Regular, Subhead, and Display. Although they can be used at any size, the intended point sizes for the optical designs of the family are:

Caption: 5–8.9 point
Regular: 9.0–14.9 point
Subhead: 15.0–22.9 point
Display: 23 point and above
Garamond Premier Pro fonts are big. In addition to the basic character suite and optical size for each version, there are also small caps, old style figures, ligatures, alternate letters, swash designs, and enough characters to set the central European, Cyrillic, and Greek languages.