The first-edition jacket for The New Journalism depicts a stylized floating skyscraper. Behind each of its twenty-one windows, there’s the silhouette of a New Journalism author hammering away at their typewriter. The fantastic airship is moved by a gigantic pencil, obviously at some speed, as the motion lines indicate. Dozens of open books flutter around the flying building in strict formation like a well-organized swarm of butterflies.

The typography brings together the shaded caps of Marble Heart for the title (with “Journalism” highlighted by the yellow pencil body), Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed for the names of the anthology editors, and all-caps Windsor Elongated for the names of the featured authors. “By Tom Wolfe” probably is lettering.

I’d love to learn who designed this! Gloria Adelson is credited for the book’s interior, but I don’t think this extends to the dust jacket.

The back lists the twenty-three texts included in the anthology in two weights of Helvetica. Two authors, Hunter S. Thompson and Wolfe himself are featured twice.

First edition by McGraw Hill, 1976

ITC Serif Gothic with a twist, for the cover of The Mother Knot by Jane Lazarre. I’d love to know who designed this cover. From the book’s introduction:

THE MYTH
The Good Mother: that omnipotent woman who can do no wrong, whose knowledge, understanding, patience, and love magically overcome all problems large and small; whose house is immaculate; whose children are beautiful and well-behaved. This is the American ideal and the cause of much of the anxiety, guilt, and frustration of motherhood.

THE REALITY
The shock and pain of giving birth, the total exhaustion of caring for a demanding newborn, the loss of identity and freedom, the feelings of ambivalence, fear, helplessness, resentment, guilt, and, yes, of love and joy … this is the life of a mother. The Mother Knot is Jane Lazarre’s intimate and painfully honest exploration of her own experiences with motherhood. With this book, she destroys the myth of the Good Mother and dares to confront the feelings which most mothers have been afraid to acknowledge even to themselves. In so doing, Jane Lazarre opens the way to healthier, more honest and fulfilling mother-father-child relationships.

First Laurel printing, Dell, Jan. 1977. The title was placed on a less steep angle here, to accomodate the blurb by Adrienne Rich: “A wholly original and important book. … I cannot imagine a woman who would not be moved, or a man who would not be enlightened.…”

Album cover for an Italian library music LP by The Baragozzi Group, released on the Fonovideo label in 1974.

A striking typographic cover for an album by jazz band leader Sammy Kaye (1910–1987), released in 1972 on Project 3 Total Sound. The swinging and swaying letters and words are from Calypso (Fonderie Olive, 1958) and Schmale Herold (Berthold, 1904).

Sammy Kaye, the famous creator of “Swing and Sway” presents these brand new recordings. This new album opens with the song “If You’ve Got the Time”. Sammy asked Johnny Mack who performed the original TV commercial [for Miller Beer] to do an encore on this album. Johnny obliged and now you’ll hear his memorable song as originally played and sung on this great album.

[More info on Discogs]

“180 pt Calypso by Roger Excoffon at the @lubalincenter” – Ken Barber

Back cover

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.

Lucky was designed by André Pless and selected by Mecanorma for publication as a competition winner in c. 1972. The charmingly naïve face with the circular counters and the horizontal contrast made it all the way from France to Singapore, where it became the brand typeface of PingPong Foods Pte Ltd.:

The name PINGPONG is synonymous with Meatballs, and Ping Pong Beefball was established in 1977 manufacturing bouncy and springy beefballs supplying initially to food stalls, then restaurants, hotels and supermarkets.

I don’t know who designed the identity and when, but I can very well imagine that Lucky has been used by PingPong since the company’s beginnings. The shop sign above shows that a few modifications were made to the typeface: the i dot was enlarged, s is custom, and t got a bar. Yes, Lucky’s original t does without a bar. The PingPong Meatballs logo additionally has a custom narrow M. Don’t miss the mirrored l in “Meatballs”, which yields yet another circular interletter counter.

The logo variant on the packaging shown further below includes the Chinese characters for PingPong, 乒乓. They have been luckified, too – how cool is that?!

The Latin script used on the packaging is Forte. I’m grateful for any pointers regarding the Chinese typeface.

Lazyboy ‎– Penguin (2004)

All the fonts your typography teacher has warned you about!

The house bag of Sunday Best Recordings is a smorgasbord of extreme display typefaces; from the ornamented 19th-century classics Romantiques No.2 aka Carnival and No.5 aka Bracelet, to Roger Excoffon’s ingenious Calypso from the 1950s and Michel Jarland’s dreamy Astral from the 1970s, to downright cheesy faces that look as if they are formed out of wood planks (Slapstick) or ties (Necktie). Each on its own is already quite flashy. Together they form a ridiculous cacotypography … that warms the cockles of the font IDer’s heart. To me this looks so colorful, it’s hard to admit that the design is actually in black and white. It’s reminiscent of ads by manufacturers of pre-digital display typefaces like this one by Mecanorma, where every word is competing for attention and yet the message is always the same. The generic sleeve was used for several releases in the mid-2000s. Boomclick’s Follow Love from 2003 might have been the earliest one. Ten years later, it was referenced again for Lazyboy’s Pica Disco. The designer is uncredited.

Originally founded as a leftfield club night in 1995 by Radio 1 DJ and Bestival co-creator Rob da Bank, Sunday Best the label emerged in 1997. New partners Sarah Bolshi & Ben Turner joined in 2000 - Sarah running the label day to day, whilst all three influenced the label's shape and direction. Renowned for its expansive and eclectic roster, as well as an unswerving dedication to the leftfield, roster includes early releases from Grand National, Max Sedgely & Dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip, as well as more recent outputs from the likes of David Lynch, Valerie June & Kitty, Daisy & Lewis. — sundaybest.net

Howdi – The Number One Song In Heaven / Play Dead (2005). The name on the sticker is in Pump Triline.

Subway – Journey (2006)

The Mary Tyler Moore Show is an American sitcom created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns that aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977. Its central character is a never-married, independent career woman, a rarity in American television in the early 1970s. It is one of the most acclaimed television programs in US television history.

Mary Richards is a thirty-something single woman who settles in Minneapolis after breaking up with a boyfriend. She lands a job as an associate producer of the evening news at WJM-TV, which happens to be the area's lowest-rated station. Her boss, Lou Grant, hates her spunk but often looks to her to solve newsroom (or even personal) problems. Mary's other coworkers include news writer Murray Slaughter, egomaniacal anchorman Ted Baxter and “Happy Homemaker” Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White). Mary's home is a modest studio apartment — and her upstairs neighbor, Rhoda Morgenstern, quickly becomes a good friend. Later in the series, Mary moves to a plush high-rise apartment before leaving Minneapolis and WJM for good. [Wikipedia]

Cover with typography in Chwast Art Tone and Orplid.

Groove is in the Art:

Vintage Hallmark booklet featuring small, removable posters. No date or design credit but I'm guessing 1970-1971. Contents have a strong Push Pin vibe. Maybe early work by one of their illustrators?

The fonts in use were all included in the library of Photo-Lettering, Inc., and shown in their One Line Manual of Styles from 1971. Several of them — Chwast Art Tone, Davison Impacta, Davison Display — were exclusively available from the NYC type house. West Bubble Gum Blockshadow was introduced in the 1969 Alphabet Yearbook.

“There’s only one thing wrong with the rat race … The rats are winning!” in Windsor Elongated.

“Never bite the foot that stomps your grapes”. This appears to be a slightly condensed version of Davison Impacta. The counters were either manually added, or available as alternates.

“They can’t fire us!!! … Slaves have to be sold.” This poster uses another face by Meyer “Dave” Davison: It is the “A” style from his Davison Display series.

“When you’re down and out lift your head & shout… HELP” Set in caps from Neue Aurora IX.

“It pays to be a nice person … about 9¢ an hour!” in West Bubble Gum Blockshadow.

“Things Are Never As Bad As They Seem … The’re Worse” in Goudy Heavyface Condensed Swash.

[More info on Discogs]

The Thorn Birds (El Pájaro Espino in Spanish) is a 1977 best-selling novel by the Australian author Colleen McCullough. For this (uncredited) jacket Cortez was slightly modified — ‘P’ was extended, ‘S’ got a descending loop, and the top-right serif on the ‘N’ was trimmed to accommodate an extended ‘R’.

Source: redmart.com © Kiuchi Brewery. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: redmart.com © Kiuchi Brewery. License: All Rights Reserved.

Everything about Hitachino Nest Beer stands out among other ale bottles, from the adorable Japanese woodblock owl, to the psychedelic fit-to-shape lettering (e.g. Red Rice), to the bold, constructivist, semi-slab Epokha, a 1992 Letraset face that’s seldom seen these days.

The brilliant designers are unknown to us, so if anyone has information, please comment! They made a few modifications to Epokha to make it Hitachino’s own, adding subtle curved bracketing to all the serifs in the “NEST BEER” logo, and more slabs to the first N [Correction: as noted by commenter Agustín Bou, this is an alternate glyph].

From Wikipedia:

Kiuchi Brewery (木内酒造) is a brewery in Naka, Japan established in 1823 by village headman Kiuchi Gihei as a sake and shochuproducer. Craft beer production began in 1996 after a change in Japanese law governing micro brewing. A number of Kiuchi's products seek to combine European beer-making technology with traditional Japanese brewing techniques.

Source: redmart.com © Kiuchi Brewery. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: redmart.com © Kiuchi Brewery. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: redmart.com © Kiuchi Brewery. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: redmart.com © Kiuchi Brewery. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: redmart.com © Kiuchi Brewery. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: redmart.com © Kiuchi Brewery. License: All Rights Reserved.

I don’t know a better advertisement for John Downer and Emigre’s Triplex Italic than the German shoe brand, Trippen. The typeface fits the product style, and the company itself is pretty cool. An LTypI? Maybe, but it makes a good logo.

Trippen’s first showroom, at Hackesche Höfe in Berlin.

What typefaces were used for the Woodstock movie posters? The answer appears to be simple: It’s Burko, designed sometime before 1969. The poster was released by Warner Brothers in 1970. But … wait. A closer look reveals that ‘a’, ‘y’, ‘m’, ‘n’ as well as ‘3’ are off. The various outstanding s-ligatures are remarkable, too. Are they custom? Or were there alternates?

At first glance the German version of the poster adapted the typeface, but with shortened ascenders. Also, the ‘es’ pair isn’t that pretty. The figure ‘3’ was taken from Futura, which was also used for the footer. Furthermore, ‘f’, ‘g’, ‘l’ and maybe other letters are modified Burko.

Improvisation, handmade and a peaceful coexistence are three keywords that could describe both the “3 days of peace, music and love” and the typography of these movie posters (and the strange photomontage of the crowd too).

With the exception of road signs and Starbucks logos, most Californians see this bit of lettering more than just about any other: the script on the current California license plate.

This general plate design was introduced in 1993 and (with some minor variations) is still in use today. I don’t yet know who is responsible for the script, but the designer clearly began with Ron Zwingelberg’s Rage Italic, a 1984 Letraset font — in the casual handwriting tradition of Mistral — that epitomizes the carefree, convertible drivin’, sun-in-the-hair, California dreamin’ aesthetic of the ’80s to early ’90s.

See more examples of the plate and its varations at David Nicholson’s extensive license plate index, Marc Welby’s Plateshack, and The Press Democrat’s Road Warrior column who reminds us that “California’s license plates are made by the thousands each year at Folsom State Prison.”

“California” set in the Rage Italic font, without modification. Rage was tamed for the California mark. The typeface’s rough contours were smoothed and letter connections improved (‘al’, ‘li’). The designer also ended the word with a new ‘i’ and swash ‘a’, perhaps stemming from the font’s alternate ‘a’, shown here.

A panel at the Peterson Automotive Museum: “The scripted red ‘California’ was introduced in 1993 and went through three different type sizes, starting with this comparatively small script and settling, in about 1997, to the large script which is seen on plates today.”

The logo for media streaming service Netflix — in use since its founding in 1997 — could be an entirely custom letttering job, but it is quite feasible that the designers based the mark on the very similar Graphique, perhaps trimming the shapes at the bottom for that retro-cinematic curved baseline.

Graphique is a 1940s typeface credited to Swiss designer Hermann Eidenbenz, the man also partially responsible for the modern incarnation of Clarendon.

There are at least two digital versions of Graphique, ARType’s Graphique-AR, which is a closer match to the metal specimens shown in Encyclopaedia of Typefaces and this Stempel specimen; and profonts’ Graphique Pro which takes more liberties with the design (see the detached ‘Q’ tail, for instance) and has a larger character set. Graphique Pro is also wider than Graphique-AR, with a heavier outline, so it could be based on a smaller size of the metal type.

Netflix headquarters.

Netflix Android app.

Netflix on a TV set.

The Netflix website. See also our entry on House of Cards.

Specimen of the metal Graphique from D. Stempel AG.

This circa 1970s calendar uses Futura Black for the days and months. The numbers, however, are custom or from another typeface I don’t know. Also, if you know the designer, date, or manufacturer, please comment!

The music video for Dillon Francis’ “Messages” is using Apple Color Emoji almost exclusively. A milestone in visual communication.