Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? is a British musical film from 1969. Anthony Newley (1931–1999) co-wrote the script, served as director, played the lead role, and composed the score. From Adam White’s 2017 article for the Telegraph:

Famed at the time for its ludicrously unwieldy title, 1969’s Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? is a surrealist sex-drenched disaster that could only ever have been made in the more free-wheeling Sixties. Released to significant controversy for Universal Pictures and given an X rating, it was dubbed “an act of professional suicide” by the New York Times.

The cover of the soundtrack album by Kapp Records is an adaptation of the movie poster, with illustration is by Robert Tanenbaum. It uses typefaces that all were available from Californian phototype company Lettergraphics. Most of the text is set in various widths and weights of Microgramma – at Lettergraphics, Microgramma and Eurostyle [sic!] were distinguished solely by whether the font was all caps or had a lowercase, without differences in the design. The title is a potpourri of Sans Shaded, Bodidot Flair (a copy of Pistilli Roman, with swashes), a generic sans in italic caps and small caps, Windsor Contour, Torena Italic Flair, Holiday, Groovy, and Gras Serrés Italique.

Recorded August 18, 1976, in Kingston, Jamaica, Man in the Hills is the follow-up to Burning Spear’s seminal Marcus Garvey from the year before. The reggae album contains several songs that reminisce about Spear’s childhood in Saint Ann. Its cover was designed by Neville Garrick (1950–2023), who takes credit for many of the covers to Bob Marley’s albums. Coincidentally, Marley was from Saint Ann as well (and so was Marcus Garvey).

Man in the Hills is one of the more prominent in-use examples of Rustic No. 2, an 1840s oddity that’s equally cherished and ridiculed. A woody typeface for roots reggae.

“Burning Spear” is visualized by a perspective setting of Firebug, an aptly named variant of Dom Casual with added flames. I don’t know where this mod originated. Dan X. Solo showed it in his book Special Effects and Topical Alphabets from 1978.

[More info on Discogs]

Song names and credits on the back cover are set in ITC Souvenir, mostly in all caps.

Front and back cover

Gatefold with liner notes by Carl Gayle from Black Music magazine

Here is a poster I did for a Christmas market gathering local designers that took place in a little coffee shop in Nantes in November 2024. I used Pinewood, a freebie digital interpretation of Rustic No. 2, both for the title and as an illustrative element, adding snow on top to make it fit to the rest of the composition. I paired it with Exposure, chosen for the warm feeling of its blurry outlines.

In Budapest, Hungary, you can find many old signs like this one for a color TV service at 1 Szász Károly Street.

“TV” is in an ornamented typeface from the mid-1800s that went under various names. Letraset had it as Romantiques No. 5, Mecanorma as Tuscan Ornate.

The other words are not typographic, but hand-made, judging from the differences between the repeating letters (see the apertures in S). For fonts in a similar style, see Thorne Shaded and the listed related options.

The sign dates back to before Google Street View began recording in 2009.

Posters for Sergio Leone’s epic 1968 spaghetti Western, with spectacular cover art by Frank McCarthy. The names of the actors are shown in bichromatic Sans Serif Shaded while the tagline is set in Goudy Heavyface.

There were three men in her life. One to take her… one to love her—and one to kill her.

In memoriam Claudia Cardinale. The Italian actor died last week at the age of 87.

Half Sheet (22″×28″)

For this Australian Daybill (13″×30″) poster, the text was drawn by hand. The letterforms are clearly based on Goudy Heavyface and Sans Serif Shaded.

Canadian One Sheet (27″×39.5″)

The West ain’t no place for a man

English-language posters for The Legend of Frenchie King (original French title: Les Pétroleuses), a satirical western comedy set in the Francophone town of Bougival Junction, Texas in 1888. The film was directed by Christian-Jaque and stars Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot.

The title at the top is set in a typeface with horizontally hatched Egyptian top and decorated Tuscan bottom halves, which were additionally given different colors in this application. According to Nicolete Gray, this design was shown in Britain by Figgins around 1870, but already much earlier by French foundries. Fonderie Typographique Française revived it in the 1950s as Romantiques No. 5.

In the bottom half, the title is shown in Quentin (c.1958), which I believe to be Filmotype’s copy of Carousel as drawn by Dave Davison for Photo-Lettering before 1950.

The names are set in Egyptian. This phototype adaptation of a battered French Clarendon was issued by VGC as part of their T.J. Lyons Antique Type Collection in 1967. The font included two to three alternates for most letters, with different “blemishes, for a more authentic look. What it didn’t offer were lowercase letters. That’s why the tagline was rendered in Playbill – the wear and tear of the glyphs here was added by hand.

All four dispay typefaces were available for VGC’s Photo Typositor at the time.

Claudia Cardinale died on 23 September 2025 at her home in Nemours, France. RIP.

British Quad (30″×40″) poster. Eat this, racist!

A flawless LTypI featuring PLINC’s Tension, for Bantam’s paperback edition of Pre-Menstrual Tension. Written by Judy Lever with Michael G. Brush, the book was designed by Roberta Rezk and first published by the McGraw-Hill Book Company in 1981. Secondary text is in all-caps ITC Tiffany.

The title page of he hardback edition is set in ITC Souvenir Bold, with initials from Thorowgood Sans Shaded.

Beach Boys’ Party! is a 1965 album by The Beach Boys, released on Capitol Records. The album features informal, acoustic-style covers of popular songs, including “Barbara Ann”, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, and “Devoted to You”, presented as a casual, sing-along gathering.

The cover design is uncredited but was most likely produced by Capitol Records’ in-house art department. It uses Sans Shaded for the main title and Ameristile for the "fan photos" text. The small text at the top, “Recorded ‘live’ at a”, is in Folio.

[More info on Discogs]

Every year the music blog New Commute asks graphic designers from all over the world to make some artwork depicting their top five albums released in the passing year. For this project, I scanned in some of my personal matchbook collection to rework my favorite albums into fake, long forgotten matchbooks. Using a wide array of my personal favorite typefaces from across eras I was able to put together this depiction of my favorite albums.

Fela Kuti and his Africa ’70 released Open & Close in 1971, on the His Master's Voice record label. The album art, designed by Grace Okotie-Eboh Oduro – here credited as Mamuli Okotie-Eboh – and Kayode Ademola, sports two typefaces on the front cover. The title is set in Tuscan Ornate, Mecanorma’s version of a 19th-century design also carried by Letraset as Romantiques No 5, and the band’s name uses Arnold Böcklin. The back cover uses pairs an illustration with the album title, this time set in Contest.

[More info on Discogs]

The Main Attraction were a pop rock band active in the late 1960s, consisting of Jeanne Salo, Gene Salo, George Bussotti, and Ronald Trale. Their sole album And Now the Main Attraction was released in 1968 on Tower Records, with a cover photo by Irv Bahrt. The uncredited typographer used a two-color setting of Thorowgood Sans Shaded a.k.a. Sans Serifs Shaded for the title. The track names are in Ultra Bodoni Extra Condensed.

[More info on Discogs]

A splendid little booklet issued by the British Transport Commission to support the exhibition of London Travel in the Nineteenth Century in 1953. This was held in the historic Shareholders’ Meeting Room at Euston station; the Commission thought that there was “no better way of making this Room accessible to the public” at the time but sadly, less than a decade later, this historic space along with the other major components of the Victorian station were bulldozed in an act of redevelopment that is still a conservation cause célèbre.

The booklet is beautiful typeset and printed by the Shenval Press who, at the time, were acknowledged as one of Britain’s finest printers. The layout and typography are very typical of the Commission’s careful ‘look’ that saw them take great care in the graphic design of their publications. The cover and title page are shown.

The title sequence used in Gaspar Noé’s Cannes-selected movie Enter the Void has amazed me over the years in terms of typography and graphic design, and thanks to a friend of mine, Puz, (some of) these fonts have been identified.

It was created by Tom Kan, a Japanese designer based in Paris. From Ian Albinson’s interview with Kan for Art of the Title:

The sequence is a typographer’s wet dream (or alternatively their nightmare). How were the various fonts and characters chosen?

The choice of typefaces came rather naturally. After coming up with a large selection in line with the film’s mood, we simply chose the ones that best suited the characters and the personalities of those in the team. Gaspar wanted each title to reflect the person it concerned. It was a beautiful homage and proof of his respect for the members of the team — a way to thank them.

Many typefaces and designs did not get used because the time limit was set — the sound mix was already done and it was impossible to extend. I think we used only 60% of the designs, all in all.

Every typeface used in the sequence seems to be a reference to other famous film title or poster fonts. What was the typeface you selected for your own credit and why?

We appropriated different typefaces, but we never wanted to copy the titles from other films in an obvious way since I thought that would be misleading. For my own credit, I went in many different directions: aged typefaces in metal, Kanji and Japanese calligraphy, techno typography… In the end, I let Gaspar choose and he went with the biggest, most legible type!

Watch the title sequence on YouTube, or right below (epilepsy/flashing lights warning):

Futura Extra Bold Condensed in all caps is the primary typeface for the credits. Here it’s used in combination with Kozuka Gothic for Japanese, alongside some logos.

Music credits include Egyptienne Medium Condensed, Garamond, Eurostile, Bodoni Condensed, Neue Helvetica 93, Futura, and Helvetica Condensed. It’s unclear if the LFO logo uses a font (Disco Deck is similar) or whether it’s custom drawn.

In addition to Futura Extra Bold Condensed, the logos of the production and distribution companies feature Euphoric (Wild Bunch) and Futura Extra Bold (Fidelité).

Producer credits feature FB Agency, Kozuka Gothic, ITC Machine, Futura Display, stretched and slanted Woodblock, and Antique Olive Nord

The names of the co-producers are set in Egyptienne Medium Condensed, Univers Ultra Condensed, Futura, an unidentified font similar to Crown Title, two unidentified stencil(ed) fonts, and Trajan.

More Egyptienne Medium Condensed for Suzanne Girard

Manager credits feature Haettenschweiler, Council, Neue Helvetica Extended (?), Clarendon, Pump Triline, Fiorello, Eurostile, Thorowgood Sans Shaded, and Futura Condensed.

The name of location manager Masahiro Hondo in Glaser Stencil serves as a mask.

Bank Gothic with rainbow glow effect for Lucio Tomaro

Photography credits with slanted Bank Gothic (Benoît Debie), bold italic City with added and extended top and baseline serifs (Gaspar Noé), TFAvian (Akira Kanno), outlined Futura (Yasushi Miyata), Bell Gothic (Jacques Bernier), and Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed (Yves Le Peillet)

Art credits featuring an unidentified blocky unicase face with 3D bevel effect similar to Mark (Marc Caro), FF Vortex (Kikuo Ohta), another unidentified blocky sans (Jean Carrière), and Zeppelin (Nicoletta Massone)

The dripping letters for Tony Crosbie appear to be custom(ized) – Shlop is a similar ready-made font.

Sound and editor credits with Eurostile (Ken Yasumoto), stretched Ironwood (Ryotaro Harada), contoured Nasalization (Claude Lahaye), an upright LCD typeface, probably Digital (Thomas Bangalter), a heavily modified Sonic or another font inspired by the Star Trek TNG logo (Lars Ginzel), Galledis with hyperextended lines (Gaspar Noé), modified SF Archery Black (Marc Boucrot), Zaius, a typeface family emulating the Planet of the Apes movie series logo (Jerome Pesnel), and ITC Machine (Pierre Buffin).

The fonts used for these cards include an unidentified inline face similar to Rubaiyat and Gothicum (Geoffroy Niquet), SF Archery Black (Yann de Cadoudal), OCR-A (Nicolas Delval), Mexcellent (Xavier Allard), fractured caps from a bold sans, possibly Compacta Black (Julien Aullas), Synchro (Bastien Laurent), Helvetica Rounded Bold Condensed (Anne-Sophie Bertrand), and an unidentified squarish sans similar to SB Carbon, Resistance Is Lowered or Apollo Rocket (Loris Paillier).

City Bold, slanted, with double contour and extended baseline serifs, for Tom Kan, Director of Typography

Gaspar Noé in outlined caps from Futura Extra Bold Condensed, without accent on the E

The blackletter typeface chosen for Lucile Hadžihalilović is Linotext (or Mariage, Wedding Text) with some modifications: e and c got bottom serifs and the swash in v was moved from the left to the right stem,

Paz de la Huerta gets various typographic treatments, including Eagle (in a weight between Bold and Black), Futura Dot with Citadel Script, outlined Egyptienne Bold Extended, and ITC Neon.

The Japanese transcription of Paz dela Huerta’s name (パス・デ・ラ・ウエルタ) appears to be Hiragino Maru Gothic or similar, with added contour.

Nathaniel Brown’s name is shown in Pump, ITC Bolt, Aachen, West Barnum Block filled with stars and stripes, and ITC Lubalin Graph Demi.

The fonts chosen for Cyril Roy include Aachen, American Text, Monotype Garamond, and at least two Japanese ones.

The MICR-inspired face used for Olly Alexander is handmade, as confirmed byo Tom Kan. Other fonts include Compacta and all-caps ITC Bolt.

The fonts used for Masato Tanno are Akzidenz-Grotesk Stencil and Ainsdale. The others are yet unidentified.

Gothicum and a (custom?) stencil version of Aachen for Ed Spear, Helvetica Rounded and Neue Helvetica 95 for Emily Alyn Lind, more Helvetica Rounded, an unidentified Japanese font, and Eagle for Jesse Kuhn and Nobu Imai

More ITC Neon and Helvetica Rounded for Sakiko Fukuhara. The bitmap font is 04b_08.

Sarah Stockbridge is set in Haettenschweiler with hyper-extended glyphs).

The names of Janice Sicotte-Beliveau and Stuart Miller are shown in Cooper Black, Impact Wide, Monterey and ITC Officina Serif, Braggadocio, Fiedler Gothic, and Blackoak.

Yemi Carol is presented in Impact Wide, Helvetica Rounded, and a Japanese Maru Gothic. The font shown at the bottom right is unidentified.

Several of the fonts used for Gaspar Noé’s name are yet unidentified. This includes alll fonts in the top row and the left one in the second row, which is similar to Moore Computer and Data 70. Other fonts include ITC Lubalin Graph, Futura Extra Bold Condensed, and Eagle.

The post-Second World War British “New Towns” had their genesis in early 20th century “Garden City” planning along with a growing sense during the 1930s that bolder steps to make better use of land, plan coherently for expansion and growth and manage the many problems of inner-city overcrowding and slum conditions were required. The 1944 Abercrombie Report into planning in Greater London suggested a series of satillite towns around London and in 1945 a New Towns Commission, under the chairmanship of Lord Reith, was announced.

In 1946 the new postwar Labour Government accordingly passed the New Towns Act 1946 that gave statutory and legal powers to enable the planning, development and construction of a series of “New Towns”. Progress was swift and on 1 August 1946 Stevenage in Hertfordshire was designated as the first New Town and the Stevenage Development Corporation was formed. The Corporation was required first to draw up a master plan, necessitating discussions with numerous central and local government interests as well as carrying out physical activities such as site surveys to ensure that physically development could take place.

Despite local opposition, and a legal setback to the plans that was eventually overcome, work did start on site albeit slowly due to postwar austerity and capital constraints. The design was predicated by the planning ethos that saw the own comprise a series of self contained neighbourhood units that had a degree of ‘self-sufficiency’ with local shops, education and health facilities. The neighbourhoods were linked to a new central Town Centre and an industrial zone; at Stevenage this was to the west of the main line railway as was to be the new A1 road bypass – the latter was not completed until 1962.

This booklet, in two editions from 1949 and a second in 1950, was printed at the Shenval Press of London and Hertford and the cover shows the prevailing contemporary typographic ‘look’ of simple and bold use of typefaces: a large size of Olympic, with letterspaced capitals from Thorowgood Sans Shaded. One interesting point; the first edition gives the first Chairman of the Corporation as being The Rev. Charles Jenkinson, the fiery priest who had become famous in his adopted Leeds for furthering social housing causes. Jenkinson, as the second edition notes, sadly died on 3 August 1949 and was replaced by Monica Felton who was equally, it appears, fiesty. Many sources give the first Chairman as being Clough Williams-Ellis yet his name appears nowhere in these official publications.

See images from the interior in Mike Ashworth’s Flickr set.

Aretha Franklin’s Soul ’69 is an album with cover versions of songs written by Big Maybelle, Percy Mayfield, Sam Cooke, Rudy Clark, and others. It was released in January 1969 by Atlantic Records, with a cover design by Loring Eutemey.

For the title line, he used a version of Thorowgood Sans Shaded, a design that goes back all the way to 1839. Chances are it’s PLINC’s adaptation named Sanserif Shade Blockshadow, which was made sometime in the mid-1960s. Eutemey already specified this typeface for another album cover in 1966 (and also was a fond user of the related Eightway). He had the letter bodies and the shadows colored in two shades of green, matching Franklin’s dress in the photograph by Jean-Pierre Leloir.

[More info on Discogs]

On the back cover, the shaded sans is used together with Melior Bold. Hermann Zapf’s sturdy roman is used for Ritchie Yorke’s liner notes, the track listing, and credits. Melior was also a recurring choice in Eutemey’s album designs.

Cover of the original vinyl release

From Wikipedia:

Horizontal is the fourth studio album by the Bee Gees, and their second album to receive an international release. The LP was released in early 1968, and included the international hit singles “Massachusetts” and “World”.

Shown here is the US release on ATCO Records, featuring squished Sans Serifs Shaded and a classic LTypI with Max Miedinger’s Horizontal for the title. The original British release by Polydor had a cover with different type (Alfereta) and image.

See Bruce Eder’s review for Allmusic.

[More info on Discogs]

Cover of a later CD version

Typographic sleeve for a French 7″ single with film music by Ennio Morricone. À l'aube du 5ème jour is the French title of The Fifth Day of Peace (original title: Gott mit uns / Dio è con noi), a WWII drama directed by Giuliano Montaldo (1930–2023) in 1970. The B-side has the title track from Le carnaval des truands (1967; original title: Ad ogni costo; English: Grand Slam), a heist movie also directed by Montaldo.

[More info on Discogs]

Tight-not-touching Carousel and Romantique No. 5 a.k.a. Bracelet for the sleeve of an Australian pressing of Tijuana Christmas. The former is a Letraset original designed by Gary Gillot and released in 1966, the latter is a 19th-century design that was adopted by Letraset around the time this album was issued.

From the back cover:

On this record you will find your favourite carols in an unfamiliar guise – we've called the album ‘Tijuana Christmas’, but you will hear the mariachi sound taking on a richer and more varied flavour as the Torero Band bring out the charms of our most beautiful carol tunes in imaginative brand new arrangements. ‘The Holly & the Ivy’ sets the pace with a bright, sparkling beat that even adds to the gaiety of one of our oldest and liveliest carols; ‘Silent Night’ a much more recent and a more devout carol, is given quite a contrasting treatment, slow and tender. ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ sets off again at a brisk, bouncy pace – and if you feel like dancing, why not? It may come as a surprise to you that our oldest carols used to be dances and that the word itself described a form of circular dance.

[More info on Discogs]

See also another cover design used by Music For Pleasures, and the design by Harmony Records.

Cover for an easy listening album first released in 1959 as Tribute to Jerome Kern by Stradivari Strings, Al Goodman’s Orchestra (Spin-O-Rama). Other versions include The Music Of Jerome Kern (Gala Records, 1961) and Ping Pong Percussion Jerome Kern (Spin-O-Rama, 1964). This undated version credited to The Limelight Strings was released by Power Records in the Apple Honey Series probably sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

The band name is in all-lowercase Schmale Herold, the compressed style added to Berthold’s Herold series in 1904. The title combines slightly stretched Umbra, the shaded variant of Ludlow’s Tempo, and Sans Serif Shaded. Track names are set in caps from Windsor Elongated.

The eleventh studio album release by Ike & Tina Turner has a double cover, each showing a portrait of the couple, with their names set in Thorowgood Sans Shaded; the album title is revealed on the inside of the gatefold: Outta Season. The music consists of a mix of original tracks and covers.

At first I thought the album artwork (shot and arranged by “Amos and Andy”) was a reference to the artwork of You Don’t Have to be Black to Love the Blues by Junior Parker – but the Ike and Tina album predates Parker’s album by three years. In turn, Parker’s album is a parody of the popular “You don’t have to be jewish” campaign for Levy’s Jewish Rye bread which ran in the 1960s–70s. It looks like the designers found some inspiration in that campaign, but what about the reversed blackface? References like the racist stereotypes of black children and adults with watermelons from the US South, and Al Jolson’s blackface are easily found in reference to this cover, adding to (at least my) confusion about what we’re looking at.

[More info on Discogs]

The track list and credits on the gatefold are set in various styles from Univers.