First use of my first font Louisette for the concert of Harry Merry and Attic Ted, two musicians playing a weird carnival music. I decided to use Louisette, an inverted rounded revival I made this last year inspired by monstruous italians. To support it, I used Zig Zag who could easily fit to my illustration style and add a funny aspect to the poster.

NG Records and Early Sounds recordings, are proud to announce the first volume of “Napoli Segreta”, a compilation of the rarest and invisible compositions of the 70’s and 80’s Neapolitan disco and funk scene.

For this project we opened the old chest of our photos, finding the perfect wrong one for the beautiful cover designed by Riccardo Corda and some other very good for presenting the whole work. Not last, we had again more fun in designing a special gift included in the LP, and some other cool goodies. Dopolavoro

The artwork for the first – and so far only – volume of Napoli Segreta (“Secret Napels”) is not shy of nodding to the 1970s/1980s. From the faded generic cover image and deliberately “simple” layout where everything is framed in boxes with rounded corners, to the typography that uses three typefaces from around 1970: it shows that the designer(s) had a lot of fun.

“Napoli Segreta” is set with Domino, a design by two (brothers or sisters?) Demarchi. The design was a winner in a Mecanorma typeface design contest in 1972. Domino came in a solid and an outline version. [Domino was likely issued only in an outline verion, see comments]. The subtitle uses outlined Blippo (1969), a sturdier typeface from the same genre. To top things off, the album was launched with a limited edition soft drink with a variation on the cover typography, paired with a moustached Italian stallion and a line using Busorama (1970): “La vecchia camomilla ha dato il posto a...”.

First and only album by the short-lived Polish pop rock band Wiatraki (“Windmills”), founded by Ryszard Poznakowski. Wiatraki 1 was released in 1970 by Polskie Nagrania Muza.

I admit, this is a bit of a stretch: Sea weed originally wasn’t a typeface in the narrow sense, but rather an alphabet reproduced in a lettering source book. Second, unlike the album art for the OFF compilation, this isn’t a use directly derived from the showing in Lettera 2. Still, it’s obvious that Maria Spychalska based her design on the letterforms drawn by Armin Haab. Not a font in use, but an alphabet design in indirect use, so to speak (see our tag “lettering derived from typeface”). Sea weed is mighty cool and quite rare, that’s why I decided it’s OK to make an exception and post this weird album cover.

Spychalska’s interpretation does without the one-sided flare serifs of Haab’s design. The version on the back cover (shown below) looks like a preliminary practice: There, the constructed skeleton letters are outlined, and hence less conjoined with the leaves. In the improved version on the front cover, the designer seized the benefits of lettering over type, and adjusted the length of the weed contextually: The gaps between W and I, A and T, etc. were minimized.

German compilation LP of Psychedelic Rock on Elektra Records featuring the Doors, Love, Mort Garson’s The Zodiac, The Incredible String Band, and several other bands.

Album cover for a collection of compositions by composer Pavel Blatný on Panton Records performed by Gustav Brom Orchestra, Czechoslovak Radio Jazz Orchestra (JOČR), and Brno City String Quartet (Kvarteto Města Brna).

Designed by Eva Heřmanská, using Gill Sans and Quartermaine Square Shadow for the typography.

Letraset had Sunshine & Moonshine, their French competitor Mecanorma had Astral. Designed by Michel Jarland, this sweet early 70s face features a sunrise with some fluffy clouds in every glyph. On this sleeve from 1974, the letters underwent a three-color treatment, rendering them even more illustrative.

The band name is in caps from Eurostile Bold Extended, which was also available as rub-down letters from Mecanorma.

Lester & Denwood was a pop rock band founded in 1973 by Charles Dumolin and Freddy Demeyere from Koekelare, Belgium. “Angela” was their third single release.

From Wikipedia:

Shake, Rattle and Roll is the title of an early rock and roll compilation album issued by Decca Records (DL 5560) in 1955, and featuring music by Bill Haley & His Comets. […] The cover art for this album, depicting a cartoon image of Haley and the Comets riding a hot rod, would later be reused by Bear Family Records for their 2006 Haley box set release Rock ’n’ Roll Arrives.

The cover typography combines bichromatic Orplid on a bouncing baseline (“SHAKE”), black sans-serif caps, possibly from Twentieth Century Ultrabold Italic, with an added scribbled inline (“RATTLE”), and red caps from a straight-sided gothic, maybe Alternate Gothic, set on a curve (“ROLL”). The handwritten “and” is probably just that, and not type. The songs are set in regular and condensed styles of Futura (or one of its US epigones like Twentieth Century or Tempo).