International Typeface Corporation
The International Typeface Corporation ( ITC ) was an international type manufacturer and was founded in 1970 in New York by type and graphic designers Aaron Burns , Herb Lubalin and Ed Rondthaler .
The aim of the company was to design fonts and make them available worldwide regardless of the typesetting system. Up to this point in time, fonts and their licensing were mostly tied to the respective typesetting system of a font manufacturer (e.g. Linotype , Monotype, etc.). In the 1970s, most typefaces were designed for phototypesetting (which made a different licensing model possible), and later they were also available in digital form.
In the early days, type designers such as Herb Lubalin, Tom Carnase , Ed Benguiat , Antonio Di Spigna , Matthew Carter and the German typographer Hermann Zapf worked for the ITC and shaped their style, which was decisively influenced by the zeitgeist of the 1970s. The shapes are often round and bold, sometimes playful - with idiosyncratic ligatures and decorative letters. Most fonts have the characteristic of an above-average length in common. Examples of typical fonts of this time are AvantGarde Gothic , ITC Garamond (fashionable new cut of Garamond), Lubalin Graph , Bauhaus , Tiffany , Souvenir , Benguiat and Usherwood .
Since 1973 the ITC published the in-house magazine U & lc. ( Upper and lower case ' upper and lower case letters'), whose title lettering has meanwhile become the epitome of ITC's own typography style. Herb Lubalin was the editor of the defining typography magazine until his death.
In 1986 the ITC was bought by Letraset and in 2000 by Agfa - Monotype , but still exists today under the same name. The abbreviation ITC can be found today as a component in the name of many fonts, some of which are popular.
The ITC is one of the pioneers of numerous independent font manufacturers today, for example FontShop or Emigre .
