Ed Berguiant, one of the great type and logo designers, has died at the age of 92.
Even if you don't recognize the name (his Benguiat font is well known among typographers, but I don't see it in the list of fonts on my PC), you will have seen some of the logos that he designed during his long career. (Ford, the New York Times, the Planet of the Apes movie).
The New York Times has published an appreciation of his life and work. I recommend watching the embedded video of him talking about his work.
Mr. Benguiat understood the intricacies of a typeface in a way that today’s computer users, with countless fonts at their disposal, generally do not. He knew that a successful design wasn’t merely in the shaping of individual letters; it was in things like the spacing between those letters. And he knew that what looks good on a computer screen might not work when blown up to the size of a marquee or a billboard.
“At three feet high, the serif of a face like Bodoni is going to be two inches thick,” he told Macworld in 2001, referring to a popular typeface. “Someone has to fix it. I get called to do that.”
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