Lovely use of Eightway, designed by Milton Glaser, for an album, also designed by Milton Glaser. The design is very much in keeping with the style that Milton started to employ in the 1970s—his own twist on Pop Art.

More information on the album itself can be found on Discogs.

Album cover of Adam Harasiewicz’s performance of Frédéric Chopin’s Etudes, Op.10 And Op.25, released by Philips Records under its World Series collection in 1969. Published in the USA via Mercury Records.

The display text is set in L&C Hairline, recognizable by the thin stroke weight and its distinct comma shape. The letter C, in Chopin, looks like it was modified from an O as the aperture in L&C Hairline is not as small as that. L&C Hairline did contain many alternates, but none for capital C. It's a really tiny detail but one that makes the word Frédérick align nicely with the ends of the C. Very nice example of how tightly this face was able to set. The World Series logotype uses a version of the Binner typeface, see the dedicated post.

A sound recording of this album is accessible through Archive.org. The published date there is listed as 1961 but that doesn’t seem right since the Philips Records’ numbering in that range (9115) are all from 1969. Plus, that would be far too early for L&H Hairline which only came out circa 1965/66.

A rare sighting of Square Gothic in use on the front of this album from 1954. The cover is designed by Mario Scheichenbauer, who was active as an album designer in the mid to late 1950s. Apparently, by the 1970s he was also an interior designer. He is probably better known for his design of the Yeti rocking chair made for the Elam furniture company in 1968.

The back cover uses the go-to album cover typefaces popular in the ’50s: Tempo, Bodoni, along with Square Gothic, plus a small bit of Copperplate Gothic.

A high-resolution cover as well as the audio recording can be found at archive.org. More details about this album are over on Discogs website.

A rare contemporary sighting of the Abbey Scroll typeface. Looks like the typeface was set using scans/images of the face rather than being typeset as there is currently no digital version of this face available.

The cover was art directed by the musician behind the band Drugdealer, Michael Collins, together with designer Teddy Rollins.

More on this release on the label’s website: Mexican Summer

A striking abstract cover designed by Ronald Clyne for Folkways Records’ release of Sound Patterns, featuring Folio Medium Extended. First issued in 1953 with catalog number FPX 130 and a cover set in caps from Lydian, the depicted cover is for a later release. There is no date stated (apart from the original 1953 release), but the new catalog number, FX 6130, is mentioned in an issue of HiFi & Music Review from September 1958. If this indeed is an announcement of the release with Clyne’s design, his use of this typeface is a very early one: according to an index card by the Bauer type foundry, Folio Medium Extended was first cast in 1959, and advertised in 1960.

[More info on Discogs]

A simple but effective design consisting of a grid of photos of Toscanini that create a sense of animation and movement of a famed conductor, punctured by text in Cheltenham Italic set on a diagonal. The design is uncredited and was most likely done in-house by RCA Victor staff designers.

The photos used on the cover are by Robert Hupka, who as a recording engineer for RCA Victor, took thousands of candid photos of Arturo Toscanini during the NBC Symphony Orchestra rehearsals.

[More info on Discogs]

A cover for a Beethoven recording that uses the alternates and swash forms of Caslon 540 Italic as the central typographic element.

The album was designed by Geoff Hocking, who was a prolific album cover designer in Australia.

[More info on Discogs]

The small text on the back cover appears to be set in another Caslon, possibly Linotype’s Caslon Oldface, or Intertype’s version.

After a production period of nearly five years, the album Electric Café was released in late 1986. The single “Music Non-Stop” was Kraftwerk’s first number one on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart in the United States. The single record cover shown here was used for the European market release.

LCD (Alan Birch, 1981) was used for other Kraftwerk releases in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, making it kind of their unofficial logo typeface. [editor’s note: It looks more like Quartz, see the comments] The album cover was designed by Hubert Kretzschmar; the “computer graphics” are credited to no less than 15 individuals and organisations.

Vol. 1, “Tchori Tchori” by Marlui Miranda, June 2018.

Selva Discos, a sublabel of Optimo Music, is “dedicated to unearth and reissue unique and exquisite Brazilian music, both from the past and the future”. The Brasingles series is about “loud 12″ singles with the original song on the A side and a rework on the B side”.

The records stand out with their simple, purely typographic covers featuring big type with mid-word linebreaks, in vibrating color combos. The typeface is dT Jakob by the local dooType foundry (see comments).

Vol. 2, “Baianá” by Barbatuques, June 2018.

Vol. 3, “Filhos De Gandhi (Um Abraço Em Gilberto Gil)” by Edson Conceição, July 2019.

Vol. 3, back cover.

Vol. 4, “Tudo Faz Sentido” by Taciana, Sep. 2019.

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

Charlie’s Records, 1976.

Garfield Blackman (1941–2000), better known as Lord Shorty and later, after he found religion, as Ras Shorty I, was a musician from Trinidad and Tobago, and dubbed the “Father of Soca”. His album (Sweet) Sweet Music from 1976 inspired the name of an exhibit of record covers presented at the Herb Lubalin Study Center on the occasion of this year’s Typographics design festival.

The cover shown above uses ITC Serif Gothic (Herb Lubalin & Tony Di Spigna, 1972), tightly spaced, stacked and interlocked, with a red i dot marking a second focal point next to the microphone. The typeface is used with some of its alternates: the uncial E, the descending s, and the spurless r (in “Lord”). This version of the record was distributed by Charlie’s Records ‎in Brooklyn, NY, with “design and graphics by Leo Hoyte for Bon Bagai Inc.”

The album was also issued by the artist’s own Shorty Music in Trinidad, with a different cover, depicted below. It uses another expressive and typical 1970s typeface, Stripes (Tony Wenman, 1973), albeit in less accomplished arrangement, and unfortunately with feeble color contrast, at least in this reproduction. The credits on the back cover read “Artwork/Layout/Type selection/Design: Sam (Langa) Rodney Jr.”

Shorty Music, 1976.

Sleeve design for the 1969 German release of Edwin Starr’s “Twenty-Five Miles”.

The most interesting aspect of this (uncredited) single cover design is probably the typeface story of the font in use: Charrette (released by Letraset in 1972) or rather likely Charrette’s predecessor French Stencil, published by Rapitype. Both are based on the same design of common French stencils.

[More info on Discogs]

In this blog post, a must-read for anyone interested in stencil type, James Mosley tells a combined first-, second-, and third-hand story of French stencils including the origin of Charrette:

I bought sets of stencils myself in Paris and used them to mark all kinds of things – folders of current work, and the numbers on new mobile shelving that was being installed in the St Bride Library, where they still survive.

When the makers of ‘Rapitype’, a rival to Letraset’s rub-down lettering, launched their product in about 1970 and were seeking new designs, I offered my stencils. They were marketed under the original name of ‘French Stencil’, and were perhaps the first font of this kind to be made.

Letraset did not get the message for another decade. When Letraset France launched an almost identical font under the name of ‘Charrette’ (the French word for a rustic two-wheeled cart, which the English company misspelled ‘Charette’), it got into trouble with the Fondation Le Corbusier for having used letters that they piously believed to have been designed by the great man for his own exclusive use. So the Letraset catalogues obediently and absurdly marked them ‘© Le Corbusier’.

For those curious about the Le Corbusier connection, see also this post on architecture blog SIAS/designnotebook: The Architect's Font: Stencil Faces (01 Le Corbusier)

Clean and simple use of ITC Grouch with an alternate R. The original version of Grouch for phototypesetting included a few variants of letters.

The sample of Grouch with the alternate letters, as shown in Lubalin Smith Carnase Typefaces catalog, 1970. The alternate letters were not published when the typeface was digitized.

Cover of the seminal roots reggae album by The Congos, produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry in his famed Black Ark studio in 1977. It is considered as one of Lee Perry's masterpiece productions. The design includes a rare use of Beans typeface which was released a few years earlier by Letraset.

[More info on Discogs]

Vinyl cover of the 40th Anniversary Edition (VP, 2017).

CD cover of the 40th Anniversary Edition (VP, 2017).