Avant-garde

The avant-garde (from French, "advance guard" or "vanguard", literally "fore-guard") are people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics.

The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the Language poets around 1981.

The avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel" ("The artist, the scientist and the industrialist", 1825), which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's] avant-garde", insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political and economic reform.

Avant

Myron Avant (born April 26, 1978), better known as Avant, is an American R&B singer and songwriter. He is best known for hits such as "Separated" (the remix featuring Kelly Rowland), "My First Love", one version of which features KeKe Wyatt, and "Read Your Mind" (remix featuring Snoop Dogg on the extended promo vinyl and released September 30, 2003). He was featured in the remix to the Lloyd Banks song "Karma" from the 2004 album The Hunger for More, and has had a cameo appearance in the 2004 feature film BarberShop 2: Back in Business.

His self-titled fifth album, Avant, was released on December 9, 2008. Avant is now signed to Verve Forecast and released his sixth studio album The Letter (formerly titled Wake Up) on December 21, 2010, featuring production from the likes of The Pentagon; Mike City; Marshall Leathers; and Kajun. Avant cites R. Kelly as his biggest influence and inspiration. His eighth album The VIII was released on September 25, 2015.

Discography

Studio albums

Singles

ITC Avant Garde

ITC Avant Garde Gothic is a font family based on the logo font used in the Avant Garde magazine. Herb Lubalin devised the logo concept and its companion headline typeface, then he and Tom Carnase, a partner in Lubalin's design firm, worked together to transform the idea into a full-fledged typeface.

The condensed fonts were drawn by Ed Benguiat in 1974, and the obliques were designed by André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt in 1977.

The original designs include one version for setting headlines and one for text copy. However, in the initial digitization, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included.

The font family consists of 5 weights (4 for condensed), with complementary obliques for widest width fonts.

When ITC released the OpenType version of the font, the original 33 alternate characters and ligatures, plus extra characters were included.

Elsner+Flake also issued the ligatures and alternate characters separately as Avant Garde Gothic Alternate.

Herb Lubalin

Herbert F. (Herb) Lubalin (pron. "loob-a'-len"; March 17, 1918 – May 24, 1981) was an American graphic designer. He collaborated with Ralph Ginzburg on three of Ginzburg's magazines: Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde, and was responsible for the creative visual beauty of these publications. He designed a typeface, ITC Avant Garde, for the last of these; this font could be described as a reproduction of art-deco, and is seen in logos created in the 1990s and 2000s.

Education and early career

Herb Lubalin entered Cooper Union at the age of seventeen, and quickly became entranced by the possibilities presented by typography as a communicative implement. Gertrude Snyder notes that during this period Lubalin was particularly struck by the differences in interpretation one could impose by changing from one typeface to another, always “fascinated by the look and sound of words (as he) expanded their message with typographic impact.” After graduating in 1939, Lubalin had a difficult time finding work; he was fired from his job at a display firm after requesting a two dollar raise on his weekly salary, up from a paltry eight (around USD100 in 2006 currency). Lubalin would eventually land at Reiss Advertising, and later worked for Sudler & Hennessey, where he practiced his considerable skills and attracted an array of design, typographic and photographic talent that included George Lois, Art Kane and John Pistilli. He served with Sudler for nineteen years before leaving to start his own firm, Herb Lubalin, Inc., in 1964 .

Gothic

Gothic may refer to:

Germanic people

Medieval culture

Romanticism

Gothic subculture