On Oct 19, 2020, at 3:34 PM, Quality Control <qualitycontrol@...> wrote:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/business/media/ed-benguiat-dead.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20201019&instance_id=23263&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=49411706&segment_id=41462&user_id=f10096923691c687607fc26800cc9204

There is a terrific video embedded in this article.
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Ed was not precisely in our field, but his wide-ranging career offers lessons to retouchers, too. I had been preparing a proper obit for this group including graphics, but have discovered that igroups support for images within messages is too limited. So I will put together a PDF and link to it here.

I have now finished a project that took longer than I thought it would. Because it contains a lot of graphics, I can't post is as a group message. I've put my PDF in the files section but here is a direct link to my Ed Benguiat obituary.

Benguiat was the most prolific type designer of the second half of the last century, with over 500 faces, mostly display, to his credit. Most of them are seldom seen today because his great skill was to be able to design to any specification. In the 1970s and 1980s the specification was an exuberant exaggeration of the identifying features of historical faces, coupled with an extremely large x-height. That fashion was all the rage back then; I swear I sometimes thought that at least half of all print advertising was set in either Ed's ITC Souvenir or in ITC Avant Garde, which wasn't his. But today we prefer a more understated, classic look.

I set the text of this obituary in several of his faces but a more lasting impact will be his logo designs, which showed not just a great grasp of letterforms but of color. He was not quite as eminent in that field as the late Paul Rand, but the PDF features a five-part graphic showing a project at which Rand failed and Ed came in to pick up the pieces: the redesign of the logo of the Ford Motor Co. It was a great piece of design work. I hope Ed's work can be an example to us all.

Dan