Cover of the original 1969 album, with “No 1” added in Helvetica

Starting in 1969 the BBC began releasing albums compiling sound effects from the BBC Sound Effects Library. A large number of albums would follow in this series, covering a range of themes and topics, with the last one being released in 1984.

For the first nine releases, a consistent design was used: A collage of images in a grid, tinted in a small number of colours to create a striking effect. For No. 1 to 6 and 8, the title was set in a two-color setting of Lettres Ornées. No. 7 and 9 instead use Stark Raving.

The first nine albums were later reissued with completely different cover designs. These new ones featured a different font for each release, which are covered individually below.

The design for the first four albums is credited to Roy Curtis-Bramwell. No designers are credited for the remaining albums or the reissues.

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Volume 7, the first to use Stark Raving for the title. “No 7” is added in Univers Bold Condensed.

A compilation of all nine original album covers

The reissue of No. 1 features Warlock Inline.

Up & Down for the reissue of No. 2

The typeface chosen for the reissue of No. 3 is unknown. Perhaps Alpha?

Italia for the reissue of No. 4

The reissue of No. 5 uses Mickey Tick.

We get to see Napoli Serial for the reissue of No. 6.

Syncopation was chosen for the reissue of No. 7.

The new cover for No. 8 has broken glass and the elusive Brutus.

Lastly, the reissued No. 9 uses Stymie.

Wikipedia:

Sound Affects is the fifth studio album by the English rock band the Jam. The album was released on 28 November 1980 by Polydor Records. It is the only Jam album to be co-produced by the band themselves, and contains the only album track co-written by the entire band, “Music for the Last Couple”.

The cover art is a pastiche of the artwork used on various Sound Effects records produced by the BBC during the 1970s.

Jam frontman Paul Weller has opined that Sound Affects is the Jam’s best album.

Despite being a tribute to the BBC Sound Effects records, the album title uses a surprisingly different font: Vineta, in italic caps with shadow. “JAM” and “NO. 80” appear to be added in Univers Bold Italic. “POW!” is in Stencil. The artist and title on the back useEurostile Bold Extended, accompanied by Helvetica.

The back cover of the album features an excerpt from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem The Masque of Anarchy.

Natty Passing Thru’ is an album by Jamaican deejay and producer Linval Roy Carter, better known as Prince Jazzbo (1951–2013). Produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry and recorded and mixed at Black Ark Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, it was released by Black Wax in Birmingham, UK.

The cover design with art by Keith Thornton – one of the label’s owners – has the album title and the artist’s name in all-lowercase Maxim. The text inside the red circle that refers to the Negusa Nagast, or “King of Kings”, features handwritten sans-serif capitals.

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Roots Radics Dub is a solo album by Jamaican bassist and singer Errol “Flabba” Holt (b. 1950), released on Tad’s Record in 1981.

The cover typography features Rosie, a phototypeface with glyphs that alternate between forms with wide tops and narrow bottoms and vice versa. Rosie originated in or before 1973, probably at Facsimile Fonts or Lettergraphics in California. With today’s OpenType technology, such alternating forms can be automated with a few lines of feature code. Back in pre-digital times, the text had to be entered manually, likely by taking turns between uppercase and lowercase characters.

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Sylvia is a 1976 album by the Charfauros Brothers, a Chamoru/Chamorro musical group from Guam. The album was released by Charfauros Brothers Productions. The title is in Filmotype Zingo with quotation marks, and the band name is in Century Expanded

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Label of double-sided coarse groove record featuring Christmas carols performed by prolific violinist and dance hall band leader Chaim "Efim" Schachmeister under the pseudonym Sascha Elmo. This recording was taken in October 1924, presumably in time to be pressed up by Christmas.

The majority of text is set in Corinna, a typeface commonly used by the German record industry in the 1920s, except for the trademark “Musica G. D.”

Issued ca. December 1924 on Deutsche Grammophon’s Polyphon imprint.

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Garçon(s) is the eighth and deeply personal album by Tom Poisson, honestly exploring themes like masculinity, aging, relationships, Alzheimer’s disease, and desire. For the cover artwork, the concept centered on memory, using childhood Polaroids of the artist and his brother—two boys raised together but shaped by different sensibilities.

Designed in collaboration with the graphic design studio Filifox founded by Philippe Savoir—notable for managing the visual communication of Angers Nantes Opéra for 15 seasons and the Festival de Cannes identity for 11 editions—the graphic challenge was to preserve the nostalgic essence of these snapshots while bringing them into 2026, letting the images speak for themselves without letting the layout overpower them.

To anchor these memories in the present, the design relies on resolutely contemporary typography, reflecting the studio's creative and meticulous approach to visual identity. The album title uses Signal Compressed (Production Type), a clean, condensed font with a subtle vintage feel that structures the composition beautifully. This geometric approach offers a sharp contrast to the texture and raw emotion of the vintage photographs.

In response, Apoc (Blaze Type) was chosen for the text. Lively, rhythmic, and almost dancing through its drawing and ligatures, it brings a dynamic and timeless quality to the layout. Since Apoc already carries the weight of a modern classic, the dialogue between these two distinct styles achieves a perfect balance, subtly enhanced by the chosen color palette to deliver an elegant, culturally grounded design.

The Chubukos was an alias used by the LA-based studio group Afrique for the release of two singles. For this particular single, the B-side is a rerelease of an Afrique song of the same name, while the A-side is a novelty funk number that expands on the sound and feel of Afrique’s cover of Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” by taking inspiration from David Seville’s chipmunk-voiced “Witch Doctor”.

The cover art for the German release of this single provides examples of two rarer typefaces: Yum-Yum is used for the artist's name, while Stagg Shaded is used for the song titles.

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This album by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and The Foggy Mountain Boys is a 1969 stereo reissue of an LP originally released in 1960. It features classic bluegrass, including hits like “Randy Lynn Rag” and “Foggy Mountain Special”. This 12-inch, 33 RPM album was released on Harmony Records, a sublabel of Columbia Records.

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Black Letter came up here on Fonts In Use before: Loring Eutemey picked it in 1964 for the cover of an album by Bent Fabric. Two years earlier, he already used it for Fathead Comes On by Dave Newman (1933–2009).

Armin Haab’s variation of Futura Black didn’t exist as a font for phototypesetting or dry transfer lettering. It’s rather an alphabet distributed in the form of a book: it was reproduced in Lettera 2 from 1961. Compared to Paul Renner’s 1929 design, it’s distinguished by boxier rounds in CDO etc. and pointed forms for AMVW, among other things.

The cover photography is by Lee Friedlander.

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Liner notes by Mort Fega

Peace and Love is an early album by Dadawah, released in 1974 on Wild Flower, a subsidiary of Federal Records ran by Paul Khouri and Richard Khouri. The Jamaican reggae singer and Nyabinghi specialist was born in 1943 as Michael George Henry and is best known under the name Ras Michael.

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Bien:( is the first extended play record by Spanish singer-songwriter and rapper C. Tangana. From Wikipedia:

Written by Tangana and co-produced with Alizzz and some other usual collaborators, the EP was released on May 14, 2020 through Sony Music. Mainly composed during the COVID-19 pandemic national lockdown in Spain, the extended play shows Tangana's evolution to a more emo and melodic rap field.

The cover includes an original photograph by Javier Ruiz. The graphic identity was developed by Paula Vila and Víctor Clemente, founders of the agency Realmente Bravo.

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This self-titled LP was the first and only studio album by Jackson C. Frank (1943–1999). Recorded by Paul Simon with contributions by Al Stewart and Art Garfunkel, it was released in December 1965.

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Fleur bleu·e is a pop duo formed by Delphine Lucy Lam and V Swann. The band name comes from a French expression that refers to a romantic sensibility embraced as artistic inspiration. Their music moves between 1990s-inspired dream pop and contemporary indie pop, sometimes jangle, sometimes shoegaze, carried by shimmering guitars and lyrics rich in symbolism.

Question Marked Upon the World was released in May 2026 by via Sunday Records (Chicago, USA) and November Souls (France). The album artwork was designed by Marie Remize and Arthur Bonifay, with text composed in Diaphragm. The complementary sans serif used for the album promotion is ABC Walter Alte.

First released in Jamaica in 1972 on Lee “Scratch” Perry’s own Upsetter label, this is the cover created for the 1973 UK release of Cloak & Dagger on Rhino Records. The design combines a bichromatic setting of Filmotype Quentin with fuzzy lettering for the artist’s name.

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From Wikipedia:

Revived Remixed Revisited is a compilation album and first remix album by American country music singer Reba McEntire. The album was released on October 8, 2021, by MCA Nashville. The album consists of three discs: Revived features ten re-recordings made with McEntire's touring band, Remixed contains ten remixes, and Revisited features ten stripped back re-recordings produced by Dave Cobb.

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Front cover featuring the Vandellas in a wheat field; above them is a rainbow with the group’s name, album title and featured tracks overlaid.

Title (in white) set in Bulletin Script #2; group name and featured tracks (both in black) set in Century Expanded Bold.

Hi, gay! Happy pridem’th!

Bulletin Script Two in prominent usage du homosexuelles on the cover of Natural Resources, the seventh studio album by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.

The cover was designed by Curtis McNair and Tom Schlesinger, with photography by Jim Hendin.

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Back cover, also featuring the group name and album title.

Credits (regular) and track list (bold) set in Univers. As the images used are of a British pressing, additional information (added by distributor EMI Records) are also set in Univers. “File under POPULAR : Pop Groups” set in Gill Sans.

Piper Oz the Hound is Art Lown’s only studio album, released in November of 1976 via United Music World. He tragically passed away only a few months later at the age of 27.

The front cover uses Eightball for the album and artist name. The back cover does the same, but uses Helvetica for all other text.

Art Lown also illustrated the pipe-playing hound Piper Oz shown on the back cover. He studied commercial art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

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From Wikipedia:

“Formentera” is a song by Spanish singer Aitana in collaboration with Argentine rapper Nicki Nicole, released through Universal Music Spain on Dec 3, 2021. The song was later included on the tracklist of her third studio album, Alpha (2023).

The design created by Paula Vila and Víctor Clemente, founders of the agency Realmente Bravo, evokes a boarding pass. In the song, the concept of a flight to the Spanish island of Formentera is used as a metaphor for love, given that it has no airport and flights are nonexistent.

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“Juvenile” (2017) was The Blaze’s debut single.

I was playing Tame Impala on my phone and, while staring at their great album art, I started wondering why so many artists reach for Eurostile. Admittedly, Tame Impala actually use Microgramma in their title treatment – but since Microgramma is Eurostile's caps-only predecessor (both originated at Nebiolo), it’s close enough to count. That got me thinking about French electro duo The Blaze, who use Eurostile consistently on their album cover art and across the titles of their (genuinely amazing) music videos.

The debut album Dancehall was released in September 2018 on Animal63. Design by Dreams Office with art direction from Manu Barron and photography by James Briandt.

Track list for Dancehall

CD label for Dancehall

The second album Jungle followed in March 2023, again with a cover by Dreams Office. The vinyl version was again released on Animal63, the CD on Believe Digital.

Back cover of Jungle

The latest album, Folk, was recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall and released in July 2025.