Founded in 1971 by Herb Lubalin, Aaron Burns, and Ed Ronthaler, ITC was formed to market type to the industry. Ed jump-started the type industry in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He played a critical role in establishing the International Typeface Corporation, the first independent licensing company for type designers. Admittedly, most know him as the guy who sat in his cramped, cluttered office on 45th Street that had just enough room to swing his pen, brush and maybe his old drum sticks around.īenguiat’s impact on the type community involves more than just design. One way or another, just about everyone in the graphic community has had some contact with Ed. and Ed Ronthaler saved me financially by paying all my debts and making me art director. He started his own company, which failed. Once out of school, Ed established an impressive career as a designer and art director at a number of large and small publishing houses, studios, and ad agencies. He became calligrapher Paul Standard’s prodigy. It was obvious that Ed couldn’t draw too well, so he went in the direction of layout, design, typography, and calligraphy. No way! I was taking the cleavage away,” he said, indicating the reaction of the motion picture industry to the crackdown on obscenity in movies in those days. “You may think I was adding to the boobs. His first job as an illustrator was as a cleavage retoucher for a movie magazine.

Since he was not good at drawing, the school advised him to quit. He wanted to draw nudes like some of the well-known illustrators. While playing on the “street”, Ed enrolled at the Workshop School of Advertising Art. He compares graphic design and typography to the rhythm and balance of a musical composition. After his stint in the Air Corps he traded his airplane control stick for drumsticks and continued the jazz percussionist career he had started before the war.Įd became established as a talented progressive jazz musician under the name Eddie Benart, and played with numerous big bands of that era, but preferred the New York gigs, playing with Bop groups on New York’s 52nd (Jazz) Street: “It kept me in town going on the road with big bands was a drag, and tough.” During that time, a Metronome and Downbeat magazine poll picked Ed as the number three sideman/drummer in America.Īlmost forty years ago Silas Rhodes, President and founder of the School of Visual Arts, gave Ed a job as a teacher. Ed would play with his father’s pens, brushes, and drafting sets, and learned about sign painting, showcard and speedball lettering.ĭuring World War II, he wasn’t old enough to enter the armed service, so with a forged photostat of his birth certificate, he enlisted in the army. His dad was display director of a large NY department store and had all the drawing tools a little boy could want. Born in Brooklyn, NYC, Edward Benguiat got acquainted with design and showcard lettering when he was nine years old.

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