Avant Garde
Type Specimen Book
Topic: Type Specimen, Book Design
Medium: Adobe Indesign
Size: 8" x 8" (48 pages)
The Avant Garde Type Specimen Book project is a book layout design that is made to showcase the characteristics of the assigned typeface Avant Garde. The project was done over the course of 5 weeks through Adobe Indesign.
When making this project, I focused on the elements of both what a typeface in general is and what particular features of the Avant Garde font makes it unique.
For example, there is a spread that showcases a layout that resembles a periodic table but with letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. This was an intentional design to convey that how each component of the type is crucial for the whole font just like the chemical elements that consist the world.
Ligatures & Glyphs as Design Elements
After working through the essentials of a general type specimen book design (such as samples of character sets, sizes, weights, special characters, etc), I moved onto what makes the Avant Garde font 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. Through arranging these together, endless array of unique shapes were able to be made while keeping the flair of Avant Garde itself as the design was made solely with its typeface elements.
With its geometric sans serif style, it had a sense of technoloic look that was utilized to set up a sci-fi theme to 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 sci-fi authors.
Such graphic elements 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.