Finding an ITC Avant Garde Alternative: 10 Unique Choices

Creative Market Last updated: September 8, 2025 · 4 min read

The story of ITC Avant Garde starts with a magazine that gave the font its name. In the 1960s, a then-new type foundry named ITC started work on a sans serif font with a twist – one that would be used for a new magazine created by Ralph Ginzburg. The publisher wanted a unique style for a font that would soon grace the covers and pages of his upcoming Avant Garde Magazine, leading to a pair of designers – Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase – putting their heads together to come up with some ideas.

Lubalin focused on the upcoming magazine’s logo, utilizing a sans serif font designed on the back of Art Deco inspiration. Sleek and straight lines separated his design from similar fonts, with several of the characters Lubalin created featuring slants where they don’t normally exist, while still keeping the rounded corners you see in typical sans serifs.

Though he wasn’t involved in the creation of the magazine’s logo, Lubalin came in a little later when Ginzburg required a full alphabet for his magazine. Drawing from the logo, he was ultimately the one to create something similar to ITC Avant as we know it today, though the font was still in its formative stages at this point.

It wasn’t until the 1970s – when Ed Benguiat started working on the font – that we started to see ITC Avant Garde Gothic take the form that we see today. He condensed the lettering that Lubalin created, lending the font more versatility, and set the stage for ITC Avant Garde to inspire many fonts that came later, including the perhaps better-known Century Gothic and the lesser-known Tex Gyre Adventor.

Still, it’s the original version that remains a firm favorite, with designers like Matt McInerney often calling upon it to give their pieces a unique flavor. But what if you want fonts similar to ITC Avant Garde, while still having their own sense of personality?

That’s where this article comes in – your guide to 10 fonts (spread across Creative Market and Fontspring) that have a similar look to ITC’s font while still having unique characteristics of their own.

Go Beyond ITC Avant Garde Gothic with These 10 Alternatives

It’s time to find a typeface that tickles your fancy – these are 10 ITC Avant Garde alternatives that come pretty close to the original design.

Causten

Available in nine weights – with matching obliques to create a total of 18 styles – Causten tries inspiration from ITC Avant Garde when it comes to its use of geometric forms. Granted, it’s a touch more conservative than its inspiration, leaning more toward rational design aesthetics ahead of Art Deco, but that decision leads to a font with near-perfect balance. For that reason, it serves the same purpose as ITC Avant Garde – it’s the ideal font to use as a typeface on print media.

Starting at$39

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Movatif

Here, we see a font that’s a little closer to ITC Avant Garde, at least in terms of its letterforms. The exaggerated leanings of several of the characters – take the “M” and “v” in the above images as examples – lend Movatif a sense of dynamism while also making it obvious that the font is basically a love letter to its more famous inspiration. That’s not to say there’s nothing modern about it. This is a 20th-century sans serif font through and through, especially with the allowances for the OpenType tech that so heavily influences many of today’s digital fonts.

Starting at$14

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Okojo

It’s clear to see the ITC Avant Garde influence on Okojo as soon as you look at the lowercase “j” in the above image – it has the same striking straight line that you see in so many of Avant Garde’s characters. In our opinion, that makes it a perfect choice for striking web content, though there’s also another twist that comes with this font. It’s available in both sans serif and slab serif formats, with the former lending your work more European sensibilities, while the latter is a typekit that’s more inspired by Americana. Either way, a designer will feel free to create almost anything when they have this entire font family available to them.

Starting at$12

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Sofia Pro

Sofia Pro dials back on some of the eccentricities of ITC Avant Garde, delivering a clearer font that focuses on legibility with just the occasional flourish in certain places. Take the connection between the “f” and “i” in the above picture – that’s pure Avant Garde even if the rest of the font takes a more traditional angle. Completely redesigned in 2012, this font combines modernism with a focus on curves, making it a beautiful typeface.

Starting at$90

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Gilmer

“Subdued” may be the best word we can use to describe the influence Gilmer takes from ITC Avant Garde, as you won’t see the angular letters that are present in Lubalin and Carnase’s creation. But what you will see are subtle nods to that more famous font. The sharp edges of the letterforms are Avant Garde-esque, as are the large x-height values that cause the font to feel like it’s leaping off the page. There’s also a touch of the neo-Grotesque to this font, making it a sort of confluence of several famous European styles.

Starting at$30

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Caros Soft

Featuring 18 fonts and nine weights – ranging from “Thin” to “Heavy & Black” – Caros Soft draws from the use of geometric shapes that make ITC Avant Garde stand out. Only, there’s a twist. Where its inspiration is all jagged edges and straight lines, Caros Soft is a more rounded font that makes it easier on the eye, at least from a legibility standpoint. Therein lies a clue to its best use – Caros Soft is an excellent general typeface for documents and marketing materials, with its heavier weights even being suitable for company logos.

Starting at$20

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This

As you’ll see from a quick glance at the above image, this is actually a font family, rather than a singular font, with some of the family bearing a closer resemblance to ITC Avant Garde than others. The “Geometry” version of the font bears the closest resemblance – at least in terms of theme – though its doubling up on some lines lends it a bit of a unique character that sees it building on its inspiration. If that’s too much for you, the “Blackletter” version introduces more curves and greater legibility, with the sans serif version being a better choice as a general typeface.

Starting at$40

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Churchward Isabella

If you’re looking for a workhorse of a font family, this creation of Joseph Churchward – the designer and namesake of the font – is an excellent choice. It looks stunning in print, much like ITC Avant Garde, though you’ll notice its capitals show no sign of the little quirks that are present in ITC’s font. That’s by design – Churchward Isabella is made to be easily readable on print or digital displays, with its main nods to Avant Garde coming from the geometric shapes used in its lettering.

Starting at$25

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Montreal Serial

Simplicity is the bread and butter of Montreal Serial, with its weight – particularly its “Regular” version and up – being more of a source of similarity with ITC Avant Gard than anything related to the design of the characters. Instead, you’re getting something clean and clear here, with minimal spacing between the characters but enough clarity to make it useful for article titles and as an all-purpose font for websites.

Starting at$14.99

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Intervogue

We’ve gone down a slightly different path with our final choice for ITC Avant Garde alternatives, as Intervogue certainly isn’t a font inspired by that unique typeface. It actually came before – 30 years before, to be precise – though you’ll see many similarities between the two. The sharp lettering is the clearest of those similarities, with the large line used for the G being reminiscent of Avant Garde. It’s also interesting to note that Intervogue was designed to be a rival to Futura – another font that could have made this list thanks to its use of geometry in its lettering.

Starting at$25.99

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can I find ITC Avant Garde on Google Fonts?

Unfortunately, Google Fonts doesn’t make the original version of ITC Avant Garde available to its users, though it has come up with a couple of alternatives. Specifically, Raleway and Poppins are great alternative choices, with Poppins in particular being very similar to the Gothic version of ITC Avant Garde that Ed Benguiat designed in the 1970s.

Is ITC Avant Garde on Adobe Fonts?

Unlike Google, Adobe offers full support for the ITC Avant Garde family of fonts. That won’t come as much of a surprise if you remember that the font was initially designed for display purposes in a print format – that makes it an ideal choice for the creation of digital documents in Adobe that may be printed out for marketing purposes. You can access the font as long as you have a Creative Cloud plan with Adobe, and the company has made it available for both desktop and web use.

How do the display and text copy versions of ITC Avant Garde differ?

An interesting point we didn’t mention in this article’s introduction is that ITC Avant Garde originally came in two flavors – the display and text versions. There are several differences between the two, with the display version of the font featuring more ligatures in the lettering, as well as an assortment of special characters that weren’t available for the text version. Those features were scaled back – aiding legibility in the process – with the later Gothic variant of Avant Garde drawing more inspiration from the text version than the display one.