Herb Lubalin (1918-1981)
“You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can’t do a great ad without good typography.” – Herb Lubalin
Herb Lubalin was only one of America’s greatest advertising art directors, he was also a graphic and typeface designer. Best known for creating the typeface Avant Garde, Lubalin also was one of the founders of the International Typeface Corporation (ITC), which created new and modernized typefaces and gave copyright and royalties to designers for the first time.
In the 1940’s, Lubalin began working at Reiss Advertising, then moved on to become the art director at Sudler and Hennessey, where he kept his position for 20 years. Lubalin also worked in collaboration with Ralph Ginzburg on the magazines Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde. He also redesigned the Saturday Evening Post.
Lubalin had a talent for using type expressively in his work, and strongly valued the communication of meaning through his pieces. He had the particular ability to handle positive and negative space as well as letterforms in his work, transforming typography from being merely words to becoming a form of artistic expression.
Herb Lubalin was the recipient of countless awards, including the AIGA medal which he was awarded in 1980