The man who designed ITC Benguiat is considered one of the type industry’s greats – and one of its longest-living. Ed Benguiat has created more than 600 fonts, and has designed some of the most iconic logos and movie titles of the 20th century.
By his own admission, Benguiat’s career has been one made of happy accidents. He says that the only thing he didn’t teach during his 50-year career at the School of Visual Arts was a course in being in the right place at the right time.
Benguiat grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The kind of kid who “was a smart ass and thought I could do anything”. He had a career as a jazz percussionist, playing the drums in the big bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, after his father set him up with a drum kit when he was 10 and he took lessons.
Benguiat was interested in art from boyhood. It was a straightforward ambition that landed him in art school: “I didn’t know anything about it I just wanted to paint naked ladies.” It didn’t entirely work out: “My instructor said I better hurry up and get out of the art industry before I destroyed it because I couldn’t draw anything.” But, Benguiat realised, “if it was technical, I could draw it.”
The female form, however, dominated his first job. “Everybody laughs at this, but it’s true: I had to remove the cleavage from photographs of women.” Benguiat worked as a paste-up boy for magazines such as Photoplay, Movie Life and Movie Stars Parade. Under the draconian censorship laws of the Motion Picture Production Code, known in the industry as the Hays Code after its president, “licentious or suggestive nudity” and “excessive or lustful kissing” had to be removed from films - and film magazines.
“The magazines weren’t permitted to show the cleavage of a woman because Hay’s Office said it wasn’t proper,” Benguiat adds. “So I’d use an airbrush and re-touch it, or use a doily or something. I did that for two years.”
Typography had been in Benguiat’s family. His father was the display director of Bloomingdales, so he had access to his brushes and pens. After designing a logo for a company, he was asked to create an alphabet to match. It was his first foray into graphic design and corporate identity.
It was when Benguiat started working as a designer for Photo-Lettering, Inc - known in the trade as PLINC, a company that set headlines and advertising text - that he first started to see that royalty penny drop: “They sold the alphabets as words from the fonts I did, so that was the beginning for me."
Benguiat didn’t stop at fonts and typefaces. He made whole new fonts for films such as The Planet of the Apes and Super Fly and David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks. He was nearly involved in the film adaptation of one of Stephen King’s novels, but production companies and the road accident which nearly left the author an amputee got in the way.
But, much as it was a logo that got him into the industry, it is logos which remain Benguiat’s most-prized work. “I’ve done the logo for The New York Times, I’ve done the logo for New York Magazine. For Sports Illustrated. The logo for Ford Cars.
“They’re my keepsakes in my mind so when I walk down the street I can say, ‘Hey, I did that.’ You know. I’m very proud of it. When I see the New York Times on a building on a wall, I can look up and say, ‘That’s my logo.’ So that’s my contribution to society.”
Benguiat continues to work, designing the odd logo, “sketching and drawing and doodling. But I don’t look forward to it because it’s a lot of work.” He prefers to keep up a weekly lunch date with the rest of graphic design’s old guard. Benguiat’s aware of the impact of the internet on typeface design, but, as someone who innovated the industry himself, doesn’t appear fearful.
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