King Crimson – “The Night Watch” / “The Great Deceiver” German single
Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Feb 13th, 2022. Artwork published in
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German picture sleeve for “The Night Watch” with B-side “The Great Deceiver”, two songs from Starless and Bible Black, the sixth studio album by English prog rockers King Crimson, released in March 1974 on Island Records.
The song names are set in super-tightly spaced L&C Stymie Hairline, with the alternate two-story a. The band name is shown in Desdemona, with initial and terminal letters that extend to form a frame around the photograph.
2 Comments on “King Crimson – “The Night Watch” / “The Great Deceiver” German single”
I love how the “K” and “N” are used and combined with the frame around the picture. Desdemona seems to be redrawn?
Yes, the letterforms had to be modified/redrawn a little to allow for the custom open ligatures (CR, MS) and the connections to the borders. The basic shapes match those of the Face revival, which closely follows the showing of Brendler’s Desdemona in Petzendorfer’s Schriftenatlas.
In contrast, Letraset’s adaptation is different in some details: most notably, O is more oval, P has no gap between bowl and stem, and the middle legs in W don’t cross. Letraset did license several designs from Face Photosetting, including Bullion, Oxford, Stack, Pluto, Marvin. In this case, though, they apparently realized there’s no point in paying royalties when they could just as well do their own revival of the same historical source.