Every year the music blog New Commute asks graphic designers from all over the world to make some artwork depicting their top five albums released in the passing year. For this project, I scanned in some of my personal matchbook collection to rework my favorite albums into fake, long forgotten matchbooks. Using a wide array of my personal favorite typefaces from across eras I was able to put together this depiction of my favorite albums.

Losing Battles is the last novel written by Eudora Welty (1909–2001), published on April 13, 1970, the author’s 61st birthday.

The typeface used for the book jacket is West Fantini, drawn by Dave West in a single Italic Swash style for Photo-Lettering. The stylized italic Clarendon is shown in their 1971 catalog, together with the slightly lighter West Grandanos. There is no digitization yet, but West Italiano – which can be described as a variant with more contrast – was digitized by House Industries.

The jacket design is credited to John “Mas” Masuo Kashiwabara (1933–2022), an art director who first worked in the field of publishing and later in pharmaceutical advertising. He employed a woodcut by Guy Fleming. Mary M. Ahern worked on the book’s interior design.

The author photo on the back panel is by Rollie McKenna (1918–2003).

For the title page, Ahern used Ultra Bodoni in roman and italic styles.

The typography was carried over to the cover of the paperback edition by Fawcett Crest from August 1971, with an italic Bookman added for the praise.

María Medem is a Spanish comic illustrator working with multiple publishing houses. This time, with Por culpa de una flor, her book is published by Blackie Books and Apa-Apa Comics.

Description from Apa-Apa Comics' website (translated from the Spanish):

The protagonist of this story lives in a village inhabited only by dogs and geckos. All the nearby villages have emptied, all the land seems barren. In hers, or in what is left of it, grows a flower that reminds her of better times. It brings back the village's cheerfulness and the fertility of the fields. Keeping that flower alive is the only thing he wants.

An unexpected visit will help him embark on a journey of self-knowledge in which he will rediscover the life he thought he had lost and learn to cultivate the flower of his desires. So that both, despite the rains and blizzards, will flourish.

The hardcover edition has 336 pages and measures 185×260mm. ISBN 978-84-18733-98-7

Days is the second studio album by American indie rock band Real Estate released on Domino Records. The artwork for the album uses a 1966 photograph entitled “Row of New Tract Houses,” which features a tract housing in Bayonne, New Jersey. The photograph is from conceptual artist Dan Graham’s 1967 photographic collection Homes for America.

Layout by Rob Carmichael of SEEN. The band logo in modified Bookman Swash Italic was designed by Robert Beatty, an artist and musician based in Lexington, Kentucky, USA. Beatty has designed album covers for Real Estate, Tame Impala, Neon Indian, and Ariel Pink.

[More info on Discogs]

1973 album from James Brown's backing band, featuring the #1 R&B hit title track.
Doing It to Death was released by Brown’s own People Records, which was acquired by Polydor on July 1, 1971, when Brown signed with that label.

The cover typography uses Cooper Hilite. The stage decoration in the photo (“James is no. 1”) is based on a geometric sans similar to Moon, Wexford, Washington, and Syncopation. Neither of those is a match, though.

[More info on Discogs]

Psyché is a symphonic poem based on the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche, written by Paris-based composer César Franck between 1886 and 1888. This recording was performed by the Residentie Orchestra (Hague Philharmonic Orchestra) together with the Nederlands Kamerkoor, conducted by Willem van Otterloo. The record was released in the Philips World Series, featuring a logo in Binner. Unfortunately, the cover design with the Rorschach test-like art in loud colors in uncredited.

The title is set in tightly spaced Chippendale. This all-caps face is shown by Lettergraphics in catalogs dated 1968 and 1976. The design is several decades older, though: Chippendale is an adaptation of a capital alphabet designed by Detroit lettering artist Charles Jay Strong (1866–1910). It’s shown without name in the second edition of Strong’s Book of Designs from 1917. Digital interpretations of this historical source include Key West (Kalynn Campbell for Roulette Studios, 2000) and MFC Petworth Monogram (Monogram Fonts Co., 2015).

The second typeface on this cover is an interesting one, too: it’s Neu-Kabel a.k.a. Cable perfect, a revision of Rudolf Koch’s Kabel with Futura-like forms for a e g W 7, issued by Klingspor in 1953 [edit: in fact, it’s Monotype’s Sans Serif with alternates, see comments].

[More info on Discogs]

Many German publishers – especially such who offer sheet music – loved Walter Tiemann’s Tiemann-Mediäval, like Schott, Peters, and Bärenreiter. This title page for Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt is an obvious example. It was first published by B. Schott’s Söhne, today known as Schott Music, in 1920. “DIE TOTE STADT” is set in Tiemann-Mediäval regular, and all other text on this page uses Tiemann-Mediäval italic.

Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), Op. 12, is an opera in three acts by Erich Wolfgang Korngold set to a libretto by Paul Schott, a collective pseudonym for the composer and his father, Julius Korngold. It is based on the 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach.

KTF Rublena and EB Garamond used for the Daily Decisions webspace. From the About page:

Disarming Design was a temporary masters programme at the Sandberg Instituut that ran from 2020 to 2022. It was committed to design practices in situations of oppression acting on the overlap of design and politics, and positioned design as a cultural tool to foster disarming ways of knowing. […]

It features collaborative works by Lama Aloul, Saja Amro, Julina Vanille Bezold, Rasha Dakkak, Farah Fayyad, Mohamed Gaber, Anna Celda, Ayman Hassan, Siwar Kraitem, Ott Metusala, Naira Nigrelli, Karmel Sabri, Qusai Al Saify, Sarah Saleh, Mohammed Tatour, Jara van Teeffelen and Samira Vogel.

In questioning the term “Disarming Design” the group grappled with the act of naming, and made an extensive list of possible DD-translations, to interpret DD according to media and outlets. These terms are the base for this digital archive of collaborative works; where each DD-interpretation presents specific projects as a conversation starter for further collaborations.

The accompanying publication Durable Discussions presents life-making practices across objects, events, places, and habits. In research through writing, seventeen essays sense and transform the poetics and politics of the everyday, offering perspectives in thinking about art and design as emancipatory politics. (Onomatopee, 2022)

This webspace has been designed and developed by PING (Miquel Hérvas Gómez, Agustina Woodgate and Sascha Krischock), Nick Reilly, Sarah Saleh and Jara van Teeffelen.

The title typeface of Mellow Gold is ITC Neon. Beck’s third studio album, and his debut major release, came out on March 1, 1994, opening with the hit song “Loser”.

ITC Neon hadn’t seen a lot of use since the 1970s. In the early 1990s, it was available in the form of various third-party digitizations, by Image Club, FontBank and others, partly under aliases like Neptune. There still isn’t an official digital version of this classic ITC design by Ronné Bonder and Tom Carnase.

The sculpture on the front cover is named Last Man After Nuclear War, by artist Eddie Lopez.

[More info on Discogs]

Back cover (vinyl)

CD inlay

CD inlay

Back cover (CD)

Postcards designed by Anna Toussaint for delpire & co, a publisher and bookshop specialised in photobooks in Paris.

Daniel Gil wasn’t just an inventive and versatile type user. He had a knack for colors, too. In the 1950s, Gil had studied in Ulm under Otl Aicher. For the 1972 Olympic Games, his former professor worked with similarly captivating color combinations including lots of green.

This cover design from 1971 is for a biography of Charles Darwin, written by Johannes Hemleben (1899–1984), who was both a biologist and a pastor of the Christian Community, an esoteric Christian denomination inspired by anthroposophy. Originally published in Rowohlt’s “rororo-Bildmonographien” series, it was translated to the Spanish by Carmen Paredes de Castro and included in Alianza Editorial’s “Ciencia y Técnica” section of their pocketbook series.

Ludlow Black, Robert H. Middleton’s take on Cooper Black, is used in all caps for the title and author of this first paperback edition of Judgment on Janus, with cover art by Alex Schomburg. The smaller type is set in two styles from News Gothic, or maybe from Record Gothic, a largely identical typeface that, like Ludlow Black, originated at Ludlow.

[More info on ISFDB]

Amazing Animals is a series of VHS video tapes produced by DK Vision together with Partridge Films, and published around 1997. Each cover shows Henry the Lizard alongside photographs of some of the featured animals. The typography uses various styles of ITC Garamond. The roman caps used for the “Amazing Animals” logo are from an unidentified typeface [it’s New York, see comments].

Poster for the exhibition Hello, Robot. at the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur (“Craft Museum”), using NN Colroy.

The key visual was made by Christoph Niemann and the poster design by Alexandra Noth.

Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970

First published by the Tinsley Bros. in London in 1874, this textbook with “Golden Rules of Bicycle Riders” and “routes through England and the rest of Europe” was reprinted in 1970. David & Charles in England and Taplinger in the United States used the same jacket design, just with different colors.

Phidian is an ornamented French Antique with line shade, patented in 1870. Almost a hundred years later, in 1967, VGC released a phototype adaptation as part of their T.J. Lyons Antique Type Collection. In the specimen, the accompanying text reads:

This definitely American face was designed right after the War between the States. It suggests action, even inspiration, with a strong hand wrapped in velvet; condensed, but commanding. It was manifestly fashionable 100 years ago, and its diamond-pointed gems sparkle in the staid surroundings of contemporary display.

The inclined numerals are from Annlie. Released by Letraset in 1966, it’s based on italic Fat Faces from the 19th century. The third typeface is Rockwell, a monolinear Egyptienne issued by Monotype in 1934.

New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970

Cover of the single-volume edition, Random House, 1973

The seventies called. They want their fancy Bookman Swash Italic swashes back.

The Charlie Brown Dictionary was based on Wendell W. Wright’s The Rainbow Dictionary from 1947, but now featuring the Peanuts for the illustrations. Various editions have been published, including a single-volume edition by Random House and two multi-volume ones by World Publishing, New York – in six volumes (A–Co, Co–Gr, Gr–Mi, Mi–Ri, Ri–Te, Te–Z) and in eight (A–B, C–E, F–H, I–Mo, Mo–P, Q–St, St–Tu, Tu–Z) – all from 1973. Several books are available in digitized form from the Internet Archive. From The Bark of the Beech Tree:

Over the eight volumes, some 2500 words are defined in 512 pages, and there are over 600 pictures, plus 50 full page state maps. Volume 1 carries an introductory “Explanation” on how the dictionary works, and each subsequent volume has a short reminder.

Spine of the single-volume edition, Random House, 1973

Covers of the 8-volume edition by World Publishing, 1973

Covers of the 8-volume edition by World Publishing, 1973

Back cover of the volume “Gr to Mi” from the 6-volume edition by World Publishing, 1973

Faced with the task of designing one single invitation for two different events held at the International Design Center (one a lecture by NASA scientists about spacecraft interiors, the other an exhibition of international furniture), Michael Bierut came up with this classic solution, where a hastily scribbled doodle depicts at the same time a cartoonish rocket and a pedestal table (slightly reminiscent of the Italian Memphis style, which was all the rage in 1984).

With its use of Bodoni and its palette of black, white and PMS Warm Red, the design is typical of the work done at the time at Vignelli Associates, which Bierut had joined three years earlier. Bierut has written about this work in his highly recommended book How to (2015), pp. 40–41.

ALBERT MERTZ
LAWRENCE WEINER

RED
AS WELL AS GREEN
AS WELL AS YELLOW
AS WELL AS BLUE

This poster from 1983 for an exhibition showing works of Albert Mertz and Lawrence Weiner was designed by the latter, and printed by Pernild & Rosengreen. Weiner used Helvetica Inserat for most information; “Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum” is set in Clarendon.

Soto is an innovative, genderless, extroverted leather bag brand. Their products are created from art-thought designs with excellent quality materials.

Kinoto Studio's branding proposal was based on combining resources with a perfect balance between classic and current trends. The logo uses Migra (Pangram Pangram); Sneak (Tightype) is used in one style as the main typeface for all typography. Both typefaces live together in an organic way in the different layouts.

Cover for the debut album by Donna Fargo (b. 1945), released by Dot Records in 1972. The Happiest Girl in The Whole U.S.A. opens up with the song of the same name. Recorded by the Californian English teacher during a school break, it became a number one hit on the country charts, and reached number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. The album also contains her follow-up single “Funny Face”, which became an even bigger hit.

The swashy italic is West Italiano. Originally drawn by Dave West in the late 1960s, it was added to the library of Photo-Lettering, Inc. (PLINC) sometime before 1971. In 2015, Steve Ross and Ken Barber digitized the face for (the now defunct) photolettering.com. Today it’s available from House Industries as Plinc Italiano, who describe it as a “silky semi-serif [that] combines ingredients from eighteenth-century engraved italics and nineteenth-century Italian Modern, softened by fine stroke endings and plump dolloped terminals.”

[More info on Discogs]

Detail: the lowercase letters of “Fargo” were aligned to the cap line, in order to allow tighter linespacing. The setting features several of Italiano’s swash caps. The song names were added in all-caps Helvetica Italic.