Object of Affection – a self titled EP debut from members of Southern California’s Fury (Run for Cover Records), Lock, Leather Slave, Aussie transplant Death Bells (Dais Records) and more. Out now as Chaotic No Good’s first ever original-music release. The Limited Edition cassettes feature two-color risograph printed j-cards printed by Martian Press.

The typeface used in the j-card design is Canopée. With its contrasting letterform widths, this typeface references Art Deco-style fonts like Plaza, Montecatini, and Mostra Nuova. In the 1980s there was a revival of 1920s influences in visual art that can be seen in cover art like The Passion’s “I’m in Love with a German Film Star”, New Order’s Movement, and Duran Duran’s Rio. The OOA sound is heavily influenced by this era of music so it is something I wanted to reference with the j-card design. Additionally, the contrast between the vertical and horizontal stokes of the letters gives this font a formal and sophisticated tone. The sharp serifs make it feel a bit dark and moody while still retaining a literal visual lightness due to the large counterforms of the O, C, G, and 0. The adjectives used to describe the font also lend themselves to the music with OOA’s brooding vocals and bright guitars.

Artwork for Dévorantes, the solo debut of Initial Artistes member Aloïse Sauvage.
Vinyl and digisleeve using Surt Extended (Blaze Type) throughout.

You Who Was Myself cover

Julia ‘Juice’ Webster approached me to design the cover for her debut EP You Who Was Myself and two singles. Already making waves as one half of Melbourne electronic duo Hemm, this is Juice’s first solo record. The design uses Neue Helvetica (83 Heavy Extended) in capitals for all typography.

“Lover, I Swear” single cover

EP launch poster

Detail

Facebook Cover

Grand Slang Italic in use for Korean musician The Allen’s album, The Shape of a Dream. The Hangul lettering is custom-drawn.

Shown here are Nicola Peter’s cover designs for Temple Solaire’s Ceremony tapes, which are a series of seven playlists on Spotify, curated by the seven members of the band.

The grotesque that is exclusively used for the covers is Ambiant Sans, designed by Laura Csocsán.

Type By’s Klub in use on a poster for the “first evening of a series observing the legacy of the experimental music collective Sonic Arts Union and its founding members” hosted by Issue Project Room. The poster was designed by Anja Kaiser in 2018.

By mixing different available widths and weights of Klub – the full family comes in eleven numbered widths, each in six weights – Anja Kaiser is making a strong example, how to achieve an eye-catching and powerful typographic poster composition. For the large information she is mixing Klub 10 Normal, Klub 02 Bold and Klub 01 Black. For the information layer she makes use of Klub 11 Normal, set in a smaller size point.

Noteworthy is her use of the alternate forms for uppercase G, R and lowercase a:

Klub specimen showing the available alternates for G, T, a.

Function Level Marker is the name of a collaboration between Florian von Ameln and Sabrina Zeltner. Their debut vinyl releases are titled “01” (with the red/purple cover) and “02” (lime/pink cover).

Music is written and produced by Florian von Ameln, albums and posters are designed by Sabrina Zeltner. Cover photo by Meike Männel, mastering by Manes at Salz Mastering. Released on 12″ vinyl and digital by Verydeeprecords in 2019.

The artwork pairs Ambiant Sans (Laura Csocsán) with a number of more experimental typefaces: Zorn (also by Laura Csocsán), Sword by Kazuhiro Aihara, 12:51 by Colin Doerffler, and Nostra Stream by Lucas Descroix.

Music video for “Interzone 22”. Video stills at the end of this post.

Text by Meera Theunert, inspired by applicants for a mars mission.

I was asked by March 2004 to get together a playlist and create an artwork for it.
March 2004 is a platform for collaborative publications and events based in the United States and Ukraine.

The Cantiere typeface has his roots in Milan, Italy. It’s inspired by a construction sign that I spotted in the Porto Venezia quarter during my half-year long sabbatical in Milan. This sign read edilmafer, which is the name of a construction company. So I already got the DNA of eight glyphs for my Cantiere. Based on this sample, I’m now working on a complete typeface. It’s quite hard to get it done, and ironically, the name Cantiere means construction site.

In combination with its round basic form and the outstanding contrast, the very special descenders and ascenders give the typeface its special look. Cantiere acts strong and goofy at the same time. Maybe one can classify it as Roman contrasted slab serif. Or maybe not.

Album launch poster. Illustration by Keith Rankin.

Mogollon Studio designed the complete music packaging and promotion for the amazing musician and artist Sui Zhen. The new album is called Losing, Linda. We created the wordmark “SUI ZHEN” and all the graphic alphabet.

We used a combination of Dinamo’s Favorit and Blaze Type’s Apoc for the whole package which includes a vinyl LP and some promotional posters.

Abum packaging.

Inner sleeve design.

Vinyl packaging poster insert.

Poster insert back.

Album back cover.

Photo by Brooklyn Morgan. Artwork by twin sisters Jessica and Alexa Viscius.

Trey Gruber, the singer of Chicago band Parent, died in 2017 at the age of 26 after a years-long battle with alcohol and heroin addiction. Gruber left a treasure trove of unreleased recordings. Gruber’s mother, along with his former partner Jessica Viscius, has worked to release this material in the time since. After going through piles of home tapes, live recordings, and studio sessions, an official tracklist was chosen. The result is the double LP Herculean House Of Cards — 26 songs in total — a song for each year Trey lived. The official release date is June 28, 2019 by Numero Group.

All headlines use tight-not-touching Kabel Black (with the exception of a few lowercase letters which indeed touch). The whole aesthetic is definitely a 1970s callback, which is a fitting companion to the music. (Kabel Black saw loads of use in the 70s and was usually spaced similarly.)

The vinyl sticker and back cover feature some outlined Kabel Black.

Cover for the single record "Last July."

The debut album of Indian-American R&B artist Raveena (Aurora) features album art by Bijan Berahimi of FISK. Berahimi is a big fan of heavy horizontals, whether they are achieved through stretching type or by using type with reverse-contrast built in, as seen in much of his other work, including Raveena’s previous single, Mama. Funkford survives the stretching admirably, and indeed it is inspired by a genre of 1960s–70s type that was designed specifically to be scaled through phototypesetting effects. The gleaming lucite effect, echoed by the clouds behind Raveena’s photo, is a nice touch.

The back side features a track list set in ITC Edwardian Script (with alternate caps) and yet another inverse-stress typeface, bb-book Text.

See more images and full credits on FISK’s website.

Gza Semibold in use for two records by Den Sorte Skole (“The Black School”), a Copenhagen-based DJ, producer and composer collective.

Symphony No. I For Sampler And Chamber Orchestra — Den Sorte Skole And The Danish National Chamber Orchestra. Limited to 800 hand-numbered copies. Includes a booklet with a list of all the samples used and credits. Writing on the record jacket is debossed and with glossy text. Recorded in The Concert Hall at The Danish Broadcasting Company, Copenhagen, June 2014.

Symphony No. II For Sampler And Chamber Orchestra — Den Sorte Skole And Copenhagen Phil. Pressing of 800 hand-numbered copies. Includes a booklet with a list of all the samples used and credits. Writing on the record jacket is debossed and with glossy text.
Recorded in The Concert Hall of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, May 2016.

Electra is a playlist of eight albums featuring women who are pushing the boundaries of electronic music. Insta-zine for @um.por.um by @dianascf. The names are set in Apoc Revelations (with several alternates for e g r C) and the album titles in Eurostile Bold Extended. The small rotated type is Authentic Sans.

Umor Rex is a record label and publishing house based in Mexico City. This entry shows four of their releases from 2017:

• UR095 — Terrence Hannum: Impiety
• UR096 — Missing Organs: Old Speakers
• UR097 — Mukqs: Dame Ningen
• UR100 — Rafael Anton Irisarri: The Shameless Years

Beacon’s third full-length record enters sight as a work of meticulous revision and refraction. Returning home to New York in 2016, four years and several tours since the duo's first release with Ghostly International, Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett knew the next direction would be different. Together they embarked on open-ended sessions, adopting a more linear style of songwriting compared to their previous loop and texture-driven method. They fundamentally constructed demos from piano chords and guitar phrases with vocal melodies, editing iterations almost ad infinitum, looking through each from a multitude of angles. Compositions expanded, while others pared back to where they began. Like the bending of light, this abstractive and patient process outlines a space and scale in which seemingly separate colors — minimalist ballads, elaborate pop spirituals, and four-on-the-floor dance sequences — can coexist at different speeds, fanning out with spectral cohesion. A prismatic collection Beacon call Gravity Pairs. [Ghostly]

Justin Sloane designed the whole album layout, merchandising and tour poster with two styles of Cardinal Classic Mid.

CD version

Tour poster

Simon Sweeney has an interesting practice of creating fictional record covers, especially on its Tumblr. I've spotted this one and instantly recognized Cardinal Fruit Italic, even with the nice bitmap effect and custom letterspacing that the designer added to the original typeface!

Cover concept: Kevin Parker
Artwork and design: Robert Beatty

From Bedow:

The typography on the front cover is hot foiled in white. The laminated sticker — a painting by British artist Paul Housely — is placed in a debossed rectangle.

The main type is Sabon, the modern classic above all, and appears on both the CD and vinyl packaging. The back cover of the vinyl version appears to be typewritten.

CD cover.

Record sleeve for the 7″ single “It Rises Eventually To The Surface” by Nosta, No More Records.

“It is an exploration of vibe and mood, space-gazing through its 42-minute stretch propelled by unknown fuels” — The Obelisk

YAGOW, the psychedelic rock trio out of the German province, have released their self-titled debut record (in a limited edition of 300) on June 16th, 2017 via Crazysane Records.

The LP is printed in two spot colors (PMS Violet and 802 Neon Yellow) and comes in a screenprinted PVC overbag. As soon as you pull the record out of the overbag, the album artwork starts to move and sucks you right into a mesmerizing vortex.

The animation technique was patented back in 1896 by W. Symons and premiered in “The Motograph Moving Picture Book”. Today, it is mostly known by the name “kinegram”.

The YAGOW LP is an early use of the revived Hershey Fonts, a type family with roots just as obscure as the music on the record. Frank Grießhammer dug deep and told their story at TypeCon2015 in Denver. The LP type system is a combination of different Hershey Fonts: Yagow’s “logo” is rendered in Hershey Italian Gothic, a set of Lombardic caps that A. V. Hershey modeled after Will Bradley’s Missal Initials (ATF, 1904). The whirlwind-like arranged track listing uses the “simplex” (single-stroke sans serif) roman, which is an adaptation of an alphabet found on Leroy lettering sets. Track numbers are in Simplex Script, with side labels in bold letters from Hershey’s “complex” alphabets.

Minotaur Sans and Shatter join the Hersheys and add a bold touch to the LP release and concert advertising banners.