Herb graduated from Cooper Union School NY (1939). Was art director (1945) and vice-president (1955) at Sudler & Hennessy. Left in 1964 to set up the design consultancy Herb Lubalin Inc. Together with Bradbury Thompson he was a pioneer in extending the role of typography into advertising and visual communication. ‘He wrote fluently with pictures and text, using words as images and images as words,’ wrote Ellen Lipton of the Lubalin Study Center. He founded and designed the magazine U&lc for ITC, which was distributed worldwide. As an editorial designer he was in charge of Saturday Evening Post, Eros (1962), Fact (1967) and Avant Garde (1968). The masthead of Avant Garde led him to design a type family of the same name. Furthermore he created the Serif Gothic typeface. Herb was elected to the NY ADC Hall of Fame (1977) and awarded the AIGA medal in 1981. He was vice-president of AGI and organized the NY AGI Congress 1979.