Ephram Edward Benguiat (; October 27, 1927October 15, 2020) was an American type designer and lettering artist. He designed over 600 typefaces, including Tiffany, Bookman, Panache, Souvenir, Edwardian Script, and the eponymous Benguiat and Benguiat Gothic. He was also known for his designs or redesigns of the logotypes for Esquire, The New York Times, Playboy, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest, Photography, Look, Sports Illustrated, The Star-Ledger, The San Diego Tribune, AT&T, A&E, Coke, Estée Lauder, Ford, and others. Other notable examples of Benguiat’s work are the logotypes for the original Planet of the Apes film, Super Fly and The Guns of Navarone, and the typeface for the opening credits for Stranger Things. Early life Benguiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 27, 1927 to Rose Nahum and Jack Benguiat. His mother was a driver with the Red Cross, and his father was a display director in the department store chain Bloomingdale's. He was exposed to design elements as early as nine, with access to his father's design tools. Although he was not old enough to enlist for the armed forces during World War II, he enlisted using a forged birth certificate and served in the Air Corps. He was stationed in Italy as a radio operator, and later performed photo reconnaissance. Career Benguiat started out his career as a jazz percussionist playing in bands with the likes of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman. In an interview, he stated of his chosen career as a designer: "I’m really a musician, a jazz percussionist. One day I went to the musician’s union to pay dues and I saw all these old people who were playing bar mitzvahs and Greek weddings. It occurred to me that one day that’s going to be me, so I decided to become an illustrator." He started his design career by working, in his words, as a "cleavage retoucher" during the restrictive period after World War II, when the Hays Code imposed restrictions on nudity in motion pictures. His role involved airbrushing and other techniques to do away with nudity in published works. He went on to study graphical design, calligraphy, and typography at the Workshop School of Advertising Art under the Russian-American graphical artist and calligrapher Paul Standard. He was hired as a designer by Esquire magazine in 1953 and subsequently went on to join Photo Lettering Inc. as a design director in 1962. It was here