Avant Garde Specimen Book
Topic: Type Specimen, Book Design
Medium: Adobe Indesign
Size: 8" x 8" (48 pages)
The Avant Garde Specimen Book is a type specimen book layout design, made to showcase the Avant Garde typeface’s characteristics.
While working on this project, I focused on the elements that a type specimen book requires and what particular features of the Avant Garde font makes it unique.
Spreads from the specimen book. Table of Contents, Character Sets, Sizes and Weights, and Overview of the Typeface spreads are shown.
This spread showcases a layout that resembles a periodic table but with letters, numbers, and punctuation marks instead of natural elements.
This was an intentional design to convey that how each component is crucial for consisting the whole typeface like how elements forms chemical compounds.
Ligatures & Glyphs as Design
After working through the essentials of a general type specimen book, I moved onto what makes the Avant Garde truly outstanding; its wide variety of ligatures and glyphs.
I found the diverse range of the Avant Garde typeface’s ligatures and glyphs as both a unique feature and a great design source.
By arranging these together, an array of unique designs came up while keeping the flair of Avant Garde, as the designs were made solely with the typeface’s elements.
With its geometric sans serif style, Avant Garde has a sense of technoloic look which was utilized to set up the theme of the specimen book itself.
Within the specimen book, I added spreads that showcase these various shapes of ligatures and glyphs along with notable quotes from science fiction novels and authors.
Such faux graphics not only adds a surprise in the book design, but also reflects the 70s retrofuturist atmosphere of when the typeface was designed for the Avant-Garde magazine, thus delivering the backstory of the typeface in a visual manner.