Broadway for the German sleeve of “Live And Let Die”,

the theme song of the 1973 James Bond film of the same name, performed by the British–American rock band Wings. Written by English musician Paul McCartney and his wife Linda McCartney, it reunited McCartney with former Beatles producer George Martin, who produced the song and arranged the orchestra. McCartney was contacted to write the song by the film’s producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli before the screenplay was finished. Wings recorded “Live and Let Die” during the sessions for Red Rose Speedway in October 1972 at AIR Studios. It was also the first rock song to open a Bond film.

[More info on Discogs]

Invitation for a Basket Sociable at the Snyder’s residence, “one mile northwest of Lititz”, Pennsylvania, 1894. The typography features the typical eclectic mix of period typefaces, including two designs by William W. Jackson for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan; Cruikshank (1886) and Unique Celtic (1889). “Basket” is set in Bruce’s Ornamented No. 1049 (1875).

The upright cursive with horizontal contrast and the large descending initials is Pencraft, designed by Herman Ihlenburg for MS&J in 1885. “Complimentary” might be Antique No. 310, a precursor to Bookman (see also Old Style Antique No. 7). The italic is Old Style No. 2 or similar. While the wide sans serif used for “Committee” is unidentified, the names appear to be set in Ronaldson (1884).

Basket
Yourself and Friend are cordially invited to attend
An Evening Sociable,
Complimentary To
Miss Mary B. Snyder,
On Saturday Evening, September [8]15th, 1894.
Meet at the residence of her father, Mr. Henry G. Snyder, one mile northwest of Lititz, at 7 o’clock sharp.
Committee:
Christ E. Snyder, Harry F. Hess.
Should the weather be unfavorable the Sociable will be held the following Saturday evening.

For a similar nineteenth-century invitation, see Evening Basket Sociable Invitation, Maytown, Pa., October 12, 1895.

A very French sighting in Lyon, spotted by Damien Gautier (205TF / Bureau 205 / Éditions 205) who shares a neverending collection of facades and lettering from all over France on his Instagram account.

The shopfront of Au Genet (a genet could refer either to a cat-like animal or a shrub) has its name set in Choc and Antique Olive Nord, both designed by Roger Excoffon.

This invoice from Typefounders of Phoenix was tucked inside a type case of metal handset 14 point Fargo caps.

The “typefounders” logotype uses lowercase letters from Filmotype Army. The invoice appears to be set in Twentieth Century or other Futura variant. Interestingly, the invoice details appear to be typed in a matching Futura variant which appears to be IBM’s Mid-Century. The IBM Selectric was introduced just the previous year to this invoice in 1961. IBM Mid-Century is shown in a 1964 NOMDA catalog.

The 1962 purchaser of this font was located in Los Gatos, CA. The same Fargo metal font is now in a print shop about five miles away in Saratoga, CA.

From Linkiesta (translated):

In Milan and Rome, and throughout the summer, a special issue of our newspaper will be distributed. Twenty four pages, broadsheet format, ten euros. (...)

It takes courage to make a paper newspaper in 2020 and in full pandemic, but Linkiesta has this courage and has decided to also become paper, starting this morning and throughout the summer.(...)

With the experience as editor of IL, the award-winning magazine of Sole 24 Ore for innovative design, Christian Rocca invited the art director Giovanni Cavalleri and the illustrators Marta Signori and Alvvino to design the paper version of Linkiesta.

Inspired by text-lead political magazines and newspapers from the 60s and 70s, the publication features illustrations by Marta Signori and a centrefold collage by Alvvino. Printed in Italy by Grafiche Antiga on 70gr Holmen Book paper in black and Pantone Blue 072U.

The typography pairs Arnhem and Arnhem Fine by Fred Smeijers with various widths of Fixture by Alejandro Paul.

Postcard of a French storefront, using three French typefaces, in Arnage, close to Le Mans, France.

The new Citationsy logo

Citationsy uses Georgia as its logotype, and iA Writer Quattro for the interface.

Over the last couple months we worked with a design agency in Leipzig – Büro 222 – to completely overhaul the look and feel of Citationsy. This affects both the web version (www.citationsy.com) as well as our mobile apps (iOS and Android). The redesign also includes a brand-new logo.

Lukas Löffler, Büro 222:

The goal of the new design was to take Citationsy seriously as a tool, and to optimise the user interface for a concentrated and distraction free workflow. With Georgia as our brand typeface we decided on a timeless classic that radiates practicality and was engineered specifically for screen use. It also loads instantly, since it comes pre-installed on all computers. Georgia is not typically used in large sizes, and by doing so we let its confident, literary personality shine. Also, it has the most beautiful asterisk * of all.

Citationsy’s old logo was just the word “Citationsy“ set in our font back then, Aileron. For the new logo, they chose the typeface Georgia and added the asterisk. The asterisk also works brilliantly on its own, as a favicon or app icon.

In the app itself we consolidated all the functions into the right hand sidebar, labelling them and making things (hopefully) more obvious. We also made several usability improvements, like not having to go into the edit screen on a reference to delete it – you can now delete references in the project.

Our old website only had one colour, a random blue. On the new website we use the same five colours as the Citationsy app itself does.

App icon and favicon

The web and mobile UI

Example of a form

The Citationsy website

On the Radio. Greatest Hits Volumes I & II by Donna Summer was released on Casablanca Records in 1979. From Wikipedia:

It was her fourth consecutive double album, and also made her the first person ever to take three consecutive double albums to the number one spot on the U.S. album chart. This would become Summer’s third multi-platinum album to date.

The album cover concept is credited to Summer herself, with graphic design by David Fleming (Gribbitt!) and photography by Harry Langdon.

Broadway Engraved (1928) is paired with cleverly customized Kaufmann Bold (1936) and caps from Harry (1966).

Detail of the original (top), compared to unmodified Kaufmann Bold (bottom, URW’s digitization). Entry strokes in n and t were dropped; closed loops in t, h, R straightened; crossbar in t, leg in R, and exit stroke in o were extended; and i dot was turned into a stroke.

An album of romantic folk music in the Pacific style, arranged and produced by Teo Macero (1925–2008) and released by Epic Records in 1963. Photography by William M. Graham. The cover typography brings a rogue wave of Cooper Black, in italic and roman styles. While the swash G, P, and T were included in ATF’s metal fonts, H and K are later inventions added in a film version. The apostrophe is a custom addition and doesn’t really blend in with the letterforms.

Alexey Brodovitch’s infatuation with Didot (in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, which he art-directed from 1934 to 1958, or on this stunning slipcase for Richard Avedon’s first monograph) is well-documented — it can almost be argued that Brodovitch single-handedly made Didot the typeface of choice for the fashion industry (see Abbott Miller's insightful article “Through thick and thin: fashion and type” in Eye 65, Autumn 2007).

The only mystery that remains is thus: where did Brodovitch get his Didot from? There's not one single Didot in Mac McGrew’s American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century — although there are plenty of Bodoni revivals, starting with Morris Fuller Benton’s ATF Bodoni (1910–11), which Brodovitch duly used for the text sizes in Harper’s Bazaar (the face was available for machine setting through Monotype as well as Intertype, among others). Did Brodovitch bring back display sizes of Didot from the yearly trips to Paris (he could have bought some from Deberny & Peignot there) he was making up until 1939 (see Kerry William Purcell’s Alexey Brodovitch, p. 58)?

Was the Didot used in Observations a phototypesetting display face (this was 1959, after all)? And if so, who provided it?

Born Bad Records has just issued this compilation of French Cha-cha music. The record sleeve is set with Excoffon’s classics Choc and Banco, paired with two other mid-century typefaces: Radiant and Brush Script. The lively and colorful ‘ligne claire’ drawings were made by Virginie Morgand, nicely evoking the French insouciance of the 1960s.

From the Born Bad Records website (translated from French):

Most had improbable dialogue, as well as senseless adaptations such as the ‘Marchand de melons’ (The Melon Merchant) distorting Herbie Hancock’s ‘Watermelon Man’, a result of automatic writing in order to come up with ridiculous lyrics. What can be said about ‘Tarte à la nana’ (Girl Pie), and how about ‘Ça c’est du poulet?’ (This is Chicken?) Or the terrible ‘Soukou Soukou’, on the limit of bad taste, words of a colonist…

When it comes to reappropriating foreign know-how, the results can turn out strange like a surreal shock of cultures. Improbable mixes, like chacha bebop, latino tempo and scat jazz...

It all definitely swings and is sometimes even quite impressive. Because magical loose moments are to be found in these records made to order, records that were just trying to recreate a successful pre-existing North American formula. They recorded them on the line, in the original spirit, or inconspicuously modified them, not only for fun, but also for the pleasure of adding on a chorus which would take the song a little further, or a well adjusted rhyme that would denote a touch of derision, a French tradition that was to be repeated in rock as in punk, and even bossa nova.

The key often being explosive arrangements, occasionally beautiful choruses, radiant mishaps, confusing mistakes, not necessarily off-topic, all in all some sweet musical trips that always have an effect on the dancefloor when it’s time to boogie. Try it out, you'll see, it works every time, if you don’t abuse of it. Moderation is recommended for this music that should be served either at cocktail hour or after midnight...

Comic Sans has been misjudged. This is its revenge: a self-defense monologue in an essay. No more bullshit.

Text by Mike Lancher, originally published at McSweeney’s in 2010. A personal project created in 2018.

The word “PRESS” on the newsstand is written in FF DIN. The two signs below seem to use Toronto Gothic.

This use focuses on the morning edition of the Trans-Alpine Yodel of the October 19th 1932, as featured in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2013) — see also this previous post about the movie poster and some other props used in the film.

We can notice that all the typefaces used in the newspaper from the Republic of Zubrowka have origins that lie before 1932.

For the newspaper’s masthead, Münchner Fraktur is mixed with a T and A from Old English. The main headline uses Cheltenham.

Body copy is typeset in Romana, and Fletcher was picked for the tragic “Dowager Countess Found Dead in Boudoir”. Fletcher is a revival of Lettres Angulaires, a typeface with arrow-like serifs, originally issued in ca. 1865 by the Beaudoire & Cie foundry in Paris.

The German cover of Prestel’s coffee table book on Art Deco is a triple Cassandre: It combines an adaptation of his “Normandie” travel poster from 1935 with a title set in Bifur (1929), the first typeface designed by the great French artist. The author’s name is rendered in Cassannet, a contemporary font based on lettering seen on posters by A.M. Cassandre.

The English version (see below) is a case of LTypI: The cover of this edition uses a face simply named Art Deco. It was issued by Mecanorma in 1975 and is credited to Mike W. Schmidt.

Design: Liquid, Augsburg. Layout: Wolfram Söll, designwerk, Munich. Hardcover with slipcase, 288pp., 260×375 mm, cover design with metallic silver foil stamping and edge coloring.

Cover detail with the silver foil stamping.

Chapter opening in Cassannet, with its superscript and underlined glyphs used for secondary words.

Spread from the interior with a painting by Suzanne Phocas (Portrait de Metzinger, 1926). The text typeface is yet unidentified. It’s a wonky interpretation of Edward Johnston’s typeface for the London Underground, with diamond-shaped dots and a monocular a, and doesn’t strike me as a successful choice. [Edit: It’s (a version of) New Transport Book, see comments below.]

Cover of the English edition (2016), featuring Mecanorma Art Deco.

In 2013, T&P Work UNit has been commissioned to conceive BETC’s new offices in Les Magasins Généraux warehouses, Pantin, France, a former granary well known for becoming the favorite graffiti artists’ playground for almost a decade (interactive exploration of the building).

Parisian studio Building Paris was in charge of the building’s signage, with the major task being to help employees finding their way in this huge space (20,000 square meters).

Regarding the exteriors spaces, to locate the six noteworthy places of the building that are not actual offices (restaurants, library…) — L’Accueil général, Le Gymnase, La Scène, Le Kartz, La Cantine and La Doc — Building Paris wanted to make something big, in connection with the building’s history.

That’s why they invited Alaric Garnier to contribute to the project. Garnier is a skilled graphic designer and type designer but he’s also the only French designer to have received a traditional sign painting training in the US. Paying homage to the many layers of painting that the block has worn, they wanted to add the ultimate one: the “2016 layer”.

Garnier decided to make something simple, not to fancy, to contrast with the impressive architecture. He chose his Mars typeface in white with a black outline and a shadow effect. The Extended width was used for La Scène lettering (note the LA ligature). The other five letterings were done using the Condensed width which was compressed even more to fit the window space.

The first step was to print the letters at actual scale to make pounce patterns. Then, in August 2016, he handpainted all the huge letterings with the help of his friend (and former teacher) Sean Barton. Five of them were done from the inside but the bigger one, La Cantine, was done from the outside, using a crane platform.

Mars is now available at Production Type.

These painted letters are part of a bigger project that can be seen on the websites of T&P Work UNit and Building Paris.

Garnier was helped by Sean Barton to complete the job. Beside being his friend, Barton was Garnier’s former sign painter master in Seattle.

This advertisement for American car manufacturer, Buick, was found in the book “American Poster ’63” published by the Art Director’s Club of Chicago. It features Fred Lambert’s typeface Compacta. As both the typeface and the poster were designed in 1963, this must mark one of the earliest commercial uses of Compacta.

The words “Dealer’s Name” are set in Futura Bold and are presumably just placeholders for where local car dealer’s would eventually display their name or logo.

For what it's worth, the poster received a “Honorable Mention” from the jury.

“Berlin? Besser ohne Nazis” (Berlin? Better without Nazis). Banner shown by counter-demonstrators at Nazi rally on 7 May 2016 in Berlin.

Berliner Bündnis gegen Rechts is a local alliance fighting racism and nationalism. One particular target in the current state election campaign is the right-wing populist AfD party.

In front of the Reichstag, seat of the German parliament

“Nationalism won’t be recycled. Professionally dispose of right-wing agitation!”

“Berlin? Better without AfD.”

Campaign material

“Protest voting for AfD because you don’t like politics is like drinking out of the pub’s toilet because the beer does not taste.”

Leaflet cover

Letterpress workshop BunkerType and type foundry ReType joined to make a wood type version of Kurversbrug — the revival of the Amsterdam bridge letter. With the wood blocks ready a poster was printed with fragment of a famous poem by Jan Campert, recreating the aesthetic of the Amsterdam School avant-garde.

Posted as an addendum to my blog article about the Volksbühne poster campaign.

Volksbühne’s spielzeitheft – the season magazine – for 2013/14 is a large-format brochure (DIN A3) with 88 pages. There are a number of black-and-white photos by Lenore Blievernicht, but most of it is purely typographic. As with the posters, a mix of blackletter typefaces has been used, but here the palette is even wider.

Typesetting German text in blackletter traditionally requires two forms for the lowercase ‘s’: the ‘long s’ (ſ) is the default. The round one, with which we are more familiar today, may only go at the end of words (more precisely: at the end of morphemes, which include prefixes or parts of compounds). The rules are in fact slightly more complicated than that, but not much. If you are interested, you can find a serviceable guideline by Friedrich Forssman both in Albert Kapr’s Fraktur and in Judith Schalansky’s Fraktur Mon Amour. Or get yourself an old edition of the Duden.

In the blackletter orgy that is the new identity of the Volksbühne Berlin, these orthotypographic rules have been ignored, much to the regret of the typography teacher in me. If you choose to use blackletter, I feel you should go all the way, and respect the special rules that come with the genre. Seeing an ‘ſ’ in final position like in -haus, das, Eins etc. hurts my eyes. Having an inappropriate ‘ſ’ in the middle of a word is worse. The theater’s name should have an ‘s’, because it is Volks·bühne (“people’s theater”). With an ‘ſ’, it reads Volk·sbühne, which is nonsense. It is similar to wrong hyphenation, think the·rapist vs. ther·apist.

It would have been understandable if LSD decided to dispense with the ‘ſ’, because it is so uncommon today. Heck, I could possibly even understand it if they used ‘ſ’ exclusively, for it is such a weird character! What they did, however, is always using the default glyph of the respective font. Sometimes that’s the ‘s’, sometime the ‘ſ’. (Note that almost all digital blackletter fonts come with both forms, even the freebies.) A pragmatic decision? I call it lazy and ignorant. But who knows – maybe the ignorance is intentional, and the carefreeness with which the rules were violated is another factor that helps undermining the historic burden of German blackletter in general, and of the simplified gotisch types from the 1930s in particular.

The cover and a few divider pages like this one are printed in orange. Only there, the letterforms are scribbled. The rest shows the glyphs as they are included in the fonts, be they razor-sharp or chubby. The stacked letters for neu (“new”) were handdrawn after the ultrablack Avebury, which was designed in 2005 by Jim Parkinson, “inspired by an early blackletter from the Caslon Foundry”.

A series of video presentations by Jürgen Kuttner, with a title that references the first stanza of the Deutschlandlied, typeset in Tannenberg Fett (1934).

The schmal (condensed) cut of Rudolf Koch’s Wallau is another typeface that was released in 1934.

The German umlaut dots on ‘äöü’ once started life as a superscript ‘e’. Linotype Textur exhibits this historic form.

Three lines of Deutsche Reichsschrift (1915–35) by Arthur Pestner. The third word reads Eins (“one”), not Einf. It should be with a round ‘s’, though, as it is the last letter in the word.

The blackletter hyphen typically is double and slightly angled. When centering lines horizontally, make sure to adjust optically and compensate for hyphens and other punctuation. Of course, this only applies when you’re aiming for fine typography. LSD Design obviously isn’t.

Baumeister needs a ‘long s’, and ideally an ‘ſt’ ligature. Wilhelm-Klingspor-Schrift indeed has such a ligature, even in the digital versions. Furthermore, in German blackletter, there can never be two ‘round s’ in a row. At the end of words, a double ‘s’ becomes an eszett: Solneß.

Bayreuth (1932 or 1935) paired with Schmalfette Gotisch (1934). Both typefaces were originally designed by F.H. Ernst Schneidler. Schottenstück should be with an ‘ſ’ and ligatures for ‘ch’ and ‘ck’.

12-Spartenhaus is set in National Fett (1934). The roman numerals on the verso denote the month of the event – this play is staged from October. The numerals as well as the small print is in Akzidenz-Grotesk.

“The Youth Theater” – the word Jugend in Tannenberg looks familiar, but it’s not a comfortable association.

Volksbühne in Tannenberg – just like it was in 1936? Not really: it’s handdrawn, it’s in bright orange, and it doesn’t give a damn about the s-rules.

A squiggly floral Fraktur from Bavaria, paired with a stiff and latticed English Textura – strictly speaking, these two blackletter styles don’t go together very well. Also, the typography sends out a different message than the photo does. While blackletter in general is often picked to represent roughness, this special selection feels rather cozy or festive, even dulcet. But who cares when the music’s loud enough?

Münchner Fraktur goes back to a typeface design by Gustav Lorenz (1850). Lorenz drew inspiration from the type made by Johann Schönsperger for the Gebetbuch for Maximilian I. in 1508–13. In 1885, Heinz König created the related Renaissance-Fraktur for Genzsch & Heyse. There are at least three digitizations, Münchner Fraktur by Manfred Klein, Alte Münchner Fraktur by Gerhard Helzel and Neue Muenchner Fraktur by Ralph M. Unger. Apparently it was also available in some form in the 1970s.

[More info on Discogs]