Detail from an undated brochure for Audiolabor’s fein MM preamplifier.

Audiolabor was one of the first manufacturers of high-end audio equipment in
Germany. Between ca. 1976 and 2003, some 5,000 amplifiers were sold. Developer Helmut Brinkmann had designed the logo himself. He based the all-lowercase wordmark on the Letraset version of Motter Tektura, with a customized round l. Audiolabor started using this logo around 1977.

Othmar Motter’s design was a popular choice for logos in the tech sector, most prominently for the original Apple logo (1977). Other examples include Ricochet’s Pong console (1976) and Steinberg, a German manufacturer of audio software (1980s). This legacy has been referenced in contemporary uses, see e.g. The True Story of Megaverb (2019).

Audiolabor’s flink preamplifier (front).

Audiolabor’s flink preamplifier (back).

Audiolabor’s flink preamplifier (interior).

Audiolabor remote control.

Addendum to the post about the first volume of Touchdown Illustrated from 1973.

In 1977, the designers of Touchdown Publications still relied on catchy faces from Letraset’s range of rubdown type. For the cover announcing the 1977 edition of the Oregon rivalry game, they went with Vexier. This “impossible” design by Christof Gassner offered the possibility to embed the teams’ colors in the letterforms; green and yellow for the Ducks and orange with white for the Beavers.

All-lowercase Motter Ombra, with initial and final letters that were hyper-extended to form a frame around the four featured photographs, for a poster advertising Poseidon.

First issued under this name in 1962, Poseidon was a magazine about all things maritime. In addition to sailing, diving, underwater photography or sealife, this also included naval ships. After all, it was published by the Militärverlag der DDR, the military publishing house of the GDR.

The logo on the magazine itself never used Motter Ombra. In 1978, shortly after this poster was made, a new design featuring Antique Olive was introduced. For more facts and images, see poseidon-archiv.de, a dedicated website maintained by Marko Wargulski.

Cover of Poseidon No. 202 from 1979, ft. Antique Olive for logo and number. The small text is in Monotype Grotesque.

Five of the six issues from 1979. For some reason, “203” is in Gill Sans instead of Antique Olive.

1977’s cover makes impactful use of Helvetica Black atop a column of six illustrations of common UFO shapes.

MUFON (The Mutual UFO Network) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to cataloging and investigating unexplained aerial phenomenon. Founded in 1969, it currently boasts "more than 4,000 members worldwide with chapters and representatives in more than 43 countries and all 50 states," according to Wikipedia.

These covers, uploaded to Twitter by the wonderful ephemera-conservation group We Are The Mutants, adorned an itinerary/annual research journal provided to attendees of MUFON's annual symposium. Their typography is both delightfully 1970s and startlingly professional for a then- (and maybe still-) fledgling organization dedicated to "fringe" science, showcasing some very slick type-image combinations.

I was only able to find an interior scan of the 1978 booklet (although a few copies of the adjoining years are available on Ebay) and the interior typesetting is somewhat less careful, doing its best with pre-digital tools and ending up with page-sized blocks of Courier with almost no leading.

1978’s cover, pairing display-heavy-hitter Carousel with ITC Avant Garde Gothic, features a wonderful series of illustrations depicting the four types of close encounter as defined by Air Force ufology advisor J. Allen Hynek.

1979 gets a little more conceptual, merging a dense wall of Avant Garde with a photocopied magnifying glass (maybe to represent the practice of combing through spacebound radio signals for anomalies?). The display typeface is Stop.

An interior scan of the 1978 booklet, the only one I could find digitized. Headings set in Helvetica Condensed and body text set in Courier. The MUFON logo typeface remains unidentified (but does not appear to be flying).

Since today, June 16, is Bloomsday to James Joyce fans, here's an addition to Stephen Coles' excellent post about the c.1977 update of Modern Library covers...

I was striking out at the flea market, and then this tasty Yagi Double caught my eye.

Dattilo in the 70s

Dattilo was the last great Nebiolo typeface by Aldo Novarese. I first saw it in brochures and a specimen book at the Drupa trade fair in 1977. Delighted to find a 20th century Egiziano, I tried to order fonts, but Nebiolo did not respond. So, Jim Parkinson made a quick display font—a two-inch film strip for the Photo Typositor.

That was for a cover story in Rolling Stone, with an Annie Leibovitz pictures of Mark Fidrych, baseball’s young star.

When I tried to visit the foundry in Torino later that year, the company was still in business, but the design studio was closed, and Aldo and his team were gone.

With the sans serif companion typeface, Forma, now revived in five sizes and five weights by David Jonathan Ross, it’s only a matter of time before we see a digital Dattilo.

A bold use (in lower case) of Information Black Extended for this magazine masthead.

Allianz SE is a German financial services company headquartered in Munich, Germany. Its core businesses are insurance and asset management. As of 2014, it is the world's largest insurance company, the largest financial services group and the largest company according to a composite measure by Forbes magazine.

In 1977, Hans Jörg Dorschel simplified and softened the German imperial eagle from Karl Schulpig’s iconic 1923 logo and added a Schadow Black logotype. That very solid mark survived for 22 years until it was replaced with an even simpler eagle and — in my opinion — weaker lettering (below right).

Allianz logos: 1890, 1923, 1977, 1999. The current logo was drawn by Georg Salden. Claus Koch hired Gerard Unger to create several custom fonts for the company, but they do not appear to be the basis for the logotype.

“Newspaper in Marin County that was founded by a crusading journalist Steve McNamara.” — Roger Black

In 1962 Peter Dixon joined the Design Studio at the British supermarket Sainsbury as an Art Director. From 1962 until 1977 the Sainsbury Design Studio created the packaging for the supermarket’s own label. The designs developed by Peter Dixon were simple and modern, completely different from anything that had been created before for those simple products. Almost all the designs show the containing product using simple geometric representations: a yellow circle for a Lemon Pie, half orange cirlces for mandarin oranges, etc.

The supermarket name is set in Venus, and the majority of the products shown here use Helvetica as the main typeface. However, other typefaces were also used, as seen in the last three images.

This is only a small portion of all the packages that were designed during these years. A book about the work of the Sainsbury Design Studio has been published by Fuel: Own Label: Sainsbury’s Design Studio 1962-1977, written by Johnny Trunk. It provides a more in-depth view of the packaging design during that period.

Alex Jay:

My Christmas card from 1977 was printed by letterpress. The typography was made with Letraset transfer type, and is from the Kabel family. I glued a candy cane to the card.