Design history · Editorial design
Eros, Fact & Avant Garde
Three magazines, one art director, and a typeface that outlasted all of them.
Between 1962 and 1971 Herb Lubalin art-directed three magazines for publisher Ralph Ginzburg that pushed American editorial typography into territory the mainstream press would not touch. Eros (1962) was a lavish hardback quarterly — oversized, multi-stock, carefully designed — shut down after only four issues when Ginzburg was convicted of mailing obscene material. Fact (1964–1967) took the opposite tack: all-type covers on uncoated paper, a deliberate austerity that made the content feel more credible and more dangerous. It folded after the Goldwater v. Ginzburg libel verdict of 1968. Avant Garde (1968–1971) brought both impulses together in a large-format, politically blunt magazine whose geometric masthead — tightly spaced capitals with interlocking ligatures — Lubalin developed with Tom Carnase into ITC Avant Garde Gothic, one of the most-copied display typefaces of the following decade. The three magazines are taught at The Graphic Design School as a case study in how editorial design, legal consequence and typographic invention can be inseparable.
Design history · Editorial design
Eros, Fact & Avant Garde
Three magazines, one art director, and a typeface that outlasted all of them.
Between 1962 and 1971 Herb Lubalin art-directed three magazines for publisher Ralph Ginzburg that pushed American editorial typography into territory the mainstream press would not touch. Eros (1962) was a lavish hardback quarterly — oversized, multi-stock, carefully designed — shut down after only four issues when Ginzburg was convicted of mailing obscene material. Fact (1964–1967) took the opposite tack: all-type covers on uncoated paper, a deliberate austerity that made the content feel more credible and more dangerous. It folded after the Goldwater v. Ginzburg libel verdict of 1968. Avant Garde (1968–1971) brought both impulses together in a large-format, politically blunt magazine whose geometric masthead — tightly spaced capitals with interlocking ligatures — Lubalin developed with Tom Carnase into ITC Avant Garde Gothic, one of the most-copied display typefaces of the following decade. The three magazines are taught at The Graphic Design School as a case study in how editorial design, legal consequence and typographic invention can be inseparable.
Key facts
- Eros
- 1962 — 4 issues; hardback quarterly; obscenity conviction (Ginzburg v. United States, 1966)
- Fact
- 1964–1967 — bimonthly (approx. 20 issues); all-type covers; folded after Goldwater v. Ginzburg libel verdict
- Avant Garde
- 1968–1971 — 14 issues; large-format; home of the Avant Garde Gothic typeface
- Art director
- Herb Lubalin (all three magazines)
- Publisher
- Ralph Ginzburg
- Typeface
- ITC Avant Garde Gothic (1970) — drawn by Lubalin with Tom Carnase from the magazine masthead
Key works & examples
Eros cover, issue 2 (Summer 1962)
1962
The second issue of Eros (Summer 1962) shows a young couple in swimwear — Lubalin's cover design is notable for what it withholds as much as what it shows. The hardback format, 13 × 10 inches and roughly 90 pages, used multiple paper stocks and careful typography to position the magazine as an art book rather than a newsstand periodical. All four issues appeared in 1962. Ginzburg was indicted under federal obscenity statutes; the Supreme Court upheld his conviction in Ginzburg v. United States (1966), a ruling that extended the definition of obscenity to cover the context of a publication's promotion rather than its content alone.
Fact — Goldwater cover (September–October 1964)
1964
The September–October 1964 issue of Fact carried Lubalin's most consequential cover: a white field with the single line "1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit To Be President." No image. No decoration. The type does all the work. Barry Goldwater sued for libel; in Goldwater v. Ginzburg a federal jury awarded him $75,000 in punitive damages. The suit put the magazine out of business in 1967. The American Psychiatric Association subsequently codified the Goldwater Rule, barring psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures without examination.
Avant Garde — No More War call for entries (1967–68)
1968
The back cover of Avant Garde issue 1 (January 1968) announced an international anti-Vietnam War poster competition. Lubalin's design is a dense wall of justified type — Victorian playbill letterforms stacked in narrow columns with a subtle stripe reference to the US flag. The composition works through accumulation rather than image: the more you read, the more the layout presses. The competition drew over two thousand entries from twenty-four countries. Winners were published in issue 5. The call-for-entries poster has been reprinted many times and is held in the Herb Lubalin Study Center collection at Cooper Union.
Avant Garde Gothic — magazine masthead (ITC, 1970)
1970
ITC Avant Garde Gothic grew directly from the magazine masthead Lubalin lettered for issue 1. Working with Tom Carnase, he developed the geometric capitals — round strokes, short straight lines, and 33 alternate characters and kerned ligatures — into a full commercial family released by the International Typeface Corporation in 1970. Carnase has noted that he alone drew the full character set and all the ligatures from Lubalin's original rough. The typeface was never cast in foundry metal, appearing first only in phototype. The image shows the masthead logogram — the source glyph from which Carnase built everything else.
Avant Garde magazine — cover, issue 1 (January 1968)
1968
The first issue of Avant Garde, January 1968, uses a full-bleed reproduction of Richard Lindner's painting Ice as its cover, with the magazine's geometric masthead set in the upper corner. Lubalin's layout gives the painting and logotype equal weight. The masthead's interlocking capitals — A, V and G so compressed the counters nearly disappear — set the visual register the magazine would hold across 14 issues. Avant Garde ran from January 1968 to July 1971. The final issue was controversial for a nude alphabet, and the magazine closed shortly after. This image is reproduced for educational and critical commentary under statutory educational licence.