ITC Benguiat (pronounced "ben-gat") was created in 1977 by Ed Benguiat, presumably while chainsmoking.
Reddit user ChunkArcade said of Benguiat:
I had Ed Benguiat as a teacher in college. Absolute legend. He used to smoke in class (looonggg past when smoking indoors was illegal in NY), tell us stories for 75% of the class, then randomly drop gems of typographic genius that I still use on a daily basis at work. Such a good soul and a fucking REBEL.
Originally the letters were intended to form part of a logo for a friend's business, but when the logo was rejected, Benguiat decided to continue working on it and turned it into a font. It was one of approximately ten billion fonts Benguiat designed.
ITC Benguiat is often described as an "Art Nouveau" font, but Benguiat denied this:
When I designed this font I was not thinking “Art Nouveau” style. My thought was just to create a beautiful font that would fit the need for a highly readable serifed font.
The font includes a number of ligatures, like AR, LA, SS, and TT, which are rarely used in practice.
One of the many places ITC Benguiat ended up being used was on book covers in the late 70s and 80s:
A well-known recent use of ITC Benguiat is in the Stranger Things logo, which is widely claimed to be based on the covers of Stephen King novels.
But... I can't actually find any Stephen King novels with ITC Benguiat on the cover? Classic Stephen King novels actually used a modified version of Pacella Latina for his name and the title, and Korinna for smaller text. (Image below from avperth on Flickr.)
Korinna and ITC Benguiat do look kind of similar, but Korinna was never used for titles. The only real similarity between Stranger Things and (some of) these covers is the way that the first and last letters of "StepheN" and "StrangeR" are bigger than the others.
I mean look at this shit:
Are people blind? That's not the same font! Look at the E, look at the G! Look how thin the verticals of the N are! Just because they're both red doesn't mean they're the same font.
"It graced the cover of countless Stephen King novels", but they couldn't find a single example because none of these covers actually used ITC Benguiat (nor do they all use the same fonts as each other). They are right about Choose Your Own Adventure books using it, though:
Fonts In Use has more examples of ITC Benguiat, as well as higher standards than slop factories like Screen Rant and Collider.
romaincrisis
stormborns
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
