Ed Benguiat—the influential type designer, World War II veteran, avid pilot, accomplished jazz percussionist and longtime SVA faculty member—died late last year at the age of 92. Over the course of a nearly seven-decade career, much of it spent with Photo-Lettering Inc. and International Typeface Corporation, Benguiat created more than 600 typefaces and designed or revised the logos for numerous films, publications, album covers and organizations. His most productive period coincided with a technological sea change in design: the advent of phototypesetting, which made fonts easier to produce, alter and distribute, moving the industry away from cumbersome metal-set type.

Benguiat was singularly prolific and could be dismissive of his work. In a 2000 interview with House Industries, a design studio that would later acquire the rights to Benguiat’s Photo-Lettering fonts, he compared himself to a bricklayer and derided his famous logo for the Planet of the Apes movies as “a bullshit piece.” In 2016 he told Fast Company that he designed typefaces because he “just wanted to make a buck”; in a video for the Type Directors Club, he judged two of his earliest fonts to be “disgustingly ugly.” In 1989 The New York Times asked him about his namesake font, ITC Benguiat. “I hate it,” he said.

This self-deprecation belied a devotion to his craft and its traditions. Even after design went digital, Benguiat insisted that his students draw letterforms by hand. In an undated speech, the text of which is held as part of the SVA Archives, he called designing “a way of life—like a priest or a rabbi,” and likened his work to composing music. “I stay with the concept for a long time,” he said, “continually making changes in balance, strokes and shapes.” In a 1984 profile in The Typographer, he scoffed at the idea that new fonts were unnecessary. “Why do we need any more music?” he said. “Why do we need more books?”

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Remembering the peerless type designer and SVA faculty member