While at PLINC, he drew thousands of alphabets and typefaces including Souvenir, Bookman and, of course, Benguiat. He designed logotypes for publications like Esquire and the New York Times and for movies like Superfly and The Guns of Navarrone. He eventually became typographic design director at Photo-Lettering, affectionately known as PLINC. But he quickly found success as a lettering artist and designer, working alongside all the luminaries of Madison Avenue in the '50s.

'I'd do a jazz gig, come home, work on some lettering, and give the bottle to the baby!' When he got his degree, he traded in his 'peg pants for a Brooks Brothers suit' and found work as a photo retoucher, appeasing the Hays Code prudery by air-brushing the racier photos found in confession mags like Photoplay and True Story. He played in bands with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton and hung out on 52nd street with cats like Tiny Grimes and Don Byas.

After serving in WWII, he knocked around New York City supporting his young family as a jazz drummer by night while going to art school by day. His early career has as many curlicues as a swash cap. These fonts make ingenious use of OpenType technology and one of them, Ed Interlock, is truly a 'smart' font, capable of automatically making the sort of visual decisions originally made on-the-fly by the typesetter or letterer.īenguiat was one of the most prolific lettering artists of the day. They've just released the Ed Benguiat Font Collection: five fonts based on lettering alphabets created in the 1950s and '6os by Art Directors Club Hall-of-Famer Ed Benguiat for Photo-Lettering, Inc. Ah, House Industries, that typographic hothouse! The Delaware-based independent type foundry is known for their inventive typefaces, creative packaging, and often fictitious backstories (tales of nonexistent Swiss designers and portly sign painters).

Font ed benguiat script