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CLOSE AND TIGHT Legendary New York art director Herb Lubalin brought humour, sensuality and a contemporary flourish to complex typographic arrangements. By Laura Forde
Herb Lubalin’s typography has been described as ‘smashed’, but nothing about his arrangement of letters on a page is violent or accidental. His methods were the stuff of legend – and none involved a sledgehammer. Nothing goes to pieces. Rarely have complex typographic arrangements been so unified. Lubalin’s marker-pen comps on tracing paper were as decisive as finished artwork. With a razor blade, he customised serifs, ascenders and descenders to his liking – some letters barely touching, others lovingly intertwined. Few designers set text in Lubalin’s ligature-rich Avant Garde with the energy and clarity its designer brought to the page. Though his career spanned five decades, Lubalin’s best work seems to inhabit a frozen moment, wedged between the corporate orthodoxy of 1960s Modernism and the Art Deco revival of the 1970s, a period of rich typographic eclecticism that endures and appeals to young designers today. Lubalin took the best of Modernism – its rigour, geometry and tightly constructed compositions – and
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3. Avant Garde no. 8, September 1969. Lubalin’s ultra-tight ligatures for cover and section titles make an elegant contrast to Picasso’s bawdy gravures. 4 (left). Logotype for movie tie-in brochure, 1965.
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