Jilkyway is the typeface used for the logo of Monkey See Monkey Do, “a colorful, upbeat CG animated series which encourages children to engage with the show’s characters through dance and song.” [Sprout] Created by Tamar & Yuval Levy, produced by Smartoonz and starring voice actor Nitzan Sitzer, the show first aired on PBS Kids Sprout on August 24, 2010. The Spanish dub is known as Mono ve, Mono hace.

The animated semi-slab is a design by Jakob Fischer a.k.a. PizzaDude, a type designer from Copenhagen, Denmark. Jilkyway is used with a contour – sometimes two contours – around the bouncy letterforms, in alternating word colors.

This is the front cover for Ballantine Books’ 1978 edition of Brain Wave, a science fiction novel written by Poul Anderson. The artwork seen here is attributed to Michael Herring, and has been used for several other editions of this book.

The main typeface used here is the hypnotic Allen Riptide, paired here with ITC Avant Garde Gothic and its condensed counterpart.

[More info on ISFDB]

Align was modified for the posters and film titles for the movie The Monkey adapted and directed by Osgood Perkins, which is based on a short story by Stephen King.

Since it was a larger movie production there were big cardboard cutouts in conjunction with the film posters at movie theatres.

There has been a reissue/reprint of the original collection of short stories, Skeleton Crew, where the story “The Monkey” originally debuted.

In the title sequence designed by Filmograph, Align is paired with a yet unidentified sans.

The catalogue for an A.R. Penck exhibition, designed by French studio SpMillot, has won an award at the 2023 “Die schönsten deutschen Bücher” (the most beautiful German books).

The main headings feature Druk Text Wide, while the body text and captions are set in JAF Lapture.

Rites de Passage was shown at Fondation Maeght in 2017.

TT Trailers is signature typeface of Monkeys Restaurant.

Situated on the central beach of Varna, Bulgaria, Monkeys restaurant introduces the idea of exploring good food and enjoying a nice and welcoming atmosphere, allowing visitors to discover something new and not so traditional.

The identity is based on the visual representation of the lost jungle, hand in hand with the feeling of a modern, funky and dynamic brand.

In the menu, TT Trailers is paired with Intro. The type on a curve in the logo is yet to be identified.

An alleged photo of the elusive Banksy holding the artist’s trademark stencil signature which is based on Stop, with horizontal stretching. The a seen here seems to have been refined over time, being either a custom modification of Stop's C or D, or perhaps loosely based on another font entirely, such as the similar Motter Tektura.

Various works by the elusive street artist Banksy. The artist's trademark signature stencil is based on Stop. Other fonts used in works by the artist include stencilled versions of Courier New, Arial and Monotype Corsiva.

A work from 1998, featuring the artist’s trademark stencil signature which is based on Stop. The A featured in this early version of the Banksy signature more closely aligns with Stop.

First appearing in 2002, Banksy’s monkeys feature messages set in a stencilled version of the bold weight of Courier New.

A work from 2007, featuring text set in a stencilled version of the bold weight of Courier New.

A work from 2003, featuring text set in a stencilled version of the black weight of Arial.

A work from 2004, featuring text set in a stencilled version of Monotype Corsiva.

Circus festival Gare au Gorille (“Beware of the Gorilla”) takes place during the summer in Bretagne, France. Paris-based graphic designer Eddy Terki designed the poster and programme for the 2022 edition, using the Black weight of Massilia (Blaze Type). The poster was animated for the festival teaser, made by Julie Grossetête.

In the program folder, the Light weight of Massilia is paired with Monotype Grotesque.

Program detail, with MT Grotesque used for information, and headers set in Massilia Light.

The unfolded program can be used as a poster.

Detail, showing a tightrope acrobat on of the lines that shape the gorilla.

Venue map

Source: www.abebooks.com Minotavros Books. License: All Rights Reserved.

Charleston for the sad story of Gargantua (1929–1949). This is the first edition of Gene Plowden’s biography, published by Bonanza Books, New York, in 1972. From the inside flap:

The name Gargantua was a household word throughout this country, and his picture was spread around the world. Millions stood in line through rain, wind, cold, and heat to pay admission to see this ugliest (if not largest or fiercest) member of the ape family ever seen outside the jungles of Africa. And after twelve years of stardom, major wire services flashed the news of his death around the world. Veteran newsman Gene Plowden, who covered the Gargantua story personally and who is a circus authority of renown, relates not only the surface success story but goes behind the scenes to reveal the stories of the many persons involved in the gorilla’s life – owners, keepers and many others. Gene Plowden tells how the young, terribly mutilated gorilla was nursed to health and domesticated by a remarkable woman; how the maturing animal helped the Ringling North brothers revive their troubled enterprise; how the carefully contrived stories of the beast's strength and ferocity created a living legend, making news copy wherever the show went.

The typeface was probably chosen for its coarse, “primal” shapes, alluding to Gargantua’s perceived untamableness. While the name in all caps makes for a strong wordmark, the subtitle suffers from the (too) tight letterspacing of the 1970s – Charleston looks better when set with a tad more tracking.

Source: archive.org Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Title page

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Cartagena Caribe is the final album by Wganda Kenya, a “Colombian latin afrobeat funk band from Medellin, set up during the 1960s by Discos Fuentes”, released in 1987.

The album art of both the vinyl and the cassette release features open and shaded caps that combine slab-serif top halves with bifurcated bottom ones. It appears to be a derivative of a 19th-century design that is known under various names, including Bracelet, Romantiques No. 5, and Tuscan Ornate. It’s not clear if they were custom drawn, or existed in prefabricated form, for example as dry transfer lettering alphabet. The band’s name is in ITC Souvenir. Most of the smaller text is printed in two widths of the IBM Selectric version of Univers.

[More info on Discogs]

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Source: www.discogs.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.discogs.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: monadsrecords.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: monadsrecords.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Bantam Books, 1968 (reprint). Cover illustration by William Hofmann.

The cover for Brave New World from the same series, with art by Lynn Sweat, uses the same compact typography, featuring a narrow block in Permanent Headline in the top left corner. Karlgeorg Hoefer’s condensed display grotesk was released by Ludwig & Mayer in 1964. It’s distinguished by compact descenders (see y and p), allowing for tight linespacing.

See also Manny Schongut’s cover design for another edition of the same book, published by Harper & Row in 1972.

[More info on ISFDB]

ITC Ronda and Helvetica schmalfett, both in all caps, supported by the IBM Selectric version of Univers, for the cover of Battle for the Planet of the Apes. The novelization of the science fiction film directed by J. Lee Thompson was published by Award Books in 1973. This is the 7th printing from 1974.

[More info on ISFDB]

Poster for the 1975 East German re-release of Planet of the Apes (USA, 1968), printed in fluorescent day-glow colors. The unknown designer didn’t revert to the original logo drawn by Ed Benguiat (see the House Industries page about their Simian for more info). Instead, they went with tightly spaced caps from Dynamo. This display face doesn’t have the unusual extenders to the top and bottom, but rather features some laterally protruding bits, or semi slab serifs. Accompanying text is set in a bold condensed weight from Gill Sans – incidentally, a similar style was used for road signs in the GDR, likewise in black on yellow.

Detail

Detail

Gorilla is a Manchester based studio specialised in “building rebel food & drink brands from zero to launch”. In their visual identity, Akkordeon 07 is the primary typeface, used for the studio logo and headlines. Body copy and navigational elements are set in GT Pressura .

For their Instagram account, the studio designed a range of fictional products matching their own visual identity, replacing selected glyphs of Akkordeon with capitals of Fette Gotisch.

Some knitting, a wool ball, a skillful and focus monkey, here are the foundations of the new identity of “Le singe qui tricote” (“The knitting monkey”). With the help of Marion Hermet (a creator from Lyon) and illustrator Nono Ampuy, we thought about an identity which could renew the image of knitting and represent the studiousness necessary for crafting it. This relaxing, manual, and creative activity needs an identity which stimulate the desire to launch into it!

The monkey represents the creator comfortably snuggled up to shape her new creations. The rounded ball of wool serves as a body for the hidden monkey and emphasizes the importance of the ball of wool which is the raw material to realize multiple creations. The monkey tail is shown by a simple thread going out from the wool ball. The whole thing is sober and draws its inspiration from traditional Japanese elements like the seals (hanko/inkan), or the bow belts (taiko musubi/obi) in order to adapt later the content to various format.

To avoid the pitfall of typefaces classically used for knitting and to revisit its image, we have opted for a non-gender-oriented visual sense, and used two typefaces:

To give a new image to knitting and give it more character, we have chosen Viksjø by Monokrom. This typeface is mainly of architectural inspiration, but also includes a research directed towards bringing some round shapes to severe and stiff lines. By using it only for its’ warm and original shapes we take somehow the opposite view. To complete the identity and bring real comfort to the reading, I used a traditional Elzevir (a serif font), Spectral by Production Type, including characteristics which allow the typeface to be rendered perfectly in a website. The typeface is inspired from François Rabelais’s book The most horrific life of the great Gargantua, father of Pantagruel (1534).

“Give Me Something”

Sam Way layers atmospheric instrumentals with gentle, natural vocals, so the artwork for his latest singles needed to compliment his authentic and intimate sound.

Listen to Sam’s music on Spotify.

“Made of Clay”

“Dance Monkey (Cover)”

In pre-Covid times, I hosted a monthly event, Necromancers of the Public Domain, wherein an aged book was reborn as a low-budget, 1-night-only New York City variety show.

I designed all the promos myself on the free design website, Canva, and immediately decided the font Sunday would be the look of Necromancers of the Public Domain.

It didn’t even occur to me til now that in addition to Sunday, most of our promos feature the hundred or nearly-hundred year old fonts of the covers of whatever book we were necromancing on any given month.

More Necromancers of the Public Domain images are on Theater of the Apes’ website.

The title card features all-caps Roberta with a perspective drop shadow.

Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp is an early 1970s comedy series featuring a cast of chimpanzee spies. It was produced by Sandler-Burns-Marmer and first aired on ABC on September 12, 1970. From Fabulous Sebastian’s review for DVD Purgatory:

Children’s television in the sixties and early seventies was bizarre. Really bizarre. I don’t know if drugs were involved, but reflecting on shows like Batman, The Magic Roundabout, Banana Splits, HR Pufnstuff, and even Sesame Street, makes me think they were. And in large quantities. Perhaps the oddest of them all was Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, which was produced from 1970 to 1972. Mike Marmer and Stan Burns, probably inspired by the success of Get Smart (where they were writers), Planet of the Apes, and Mr Ed, had the idea to create a spy series using talking chimpanzees. The cost of creating costumes and sets in perfect scale for the apes made it the most expensive Saturday morning children’s show of its time. And it looks fantastic for the effort.

The show centred around Link and his love interest, the glamorous Mata Hairi, who were spies for APE (Agency to Prevent Evil). APE were in a continual war with CHUMP (Criminal Headquarters for Underworld Master Plan), headed by Baron von Butcher (voiced by Bernie Kopell who played Siegfried in Get Smart). Each show also included Lance and friends performing as The Evolution Revolution, who were the coolest band of the time (much cooler than Josie and the Pussycats or The Monkees).

The Agency to Prevent Evil (A.P.E.) wordmark uses City Bold with faux small caps, set on a curve and framed by bananas.

Roberta appears again for the secondary title card.

The squarish sans-serif caps with rounded corners used for the logo of C.H.U.M.P. (Criminal Headquarters for Underworld Master Plan) appear to be custom lettering.

Among the accompanying merchandise was a metal lunch box produced by Thermos (1971). Here, the “Lance Link” wordmark uses Bauhaus Geometric Shaded (Photo-Lettering, 1970). This precursor to ITC Bauhaus (1975) was drawn by Ed Benguiat, who also helped to develop the title graphic for Planet of the Apes in 1968. [House Industries] “Secret Chimp” is set in Broadway Condensed. Link is shown together with Mata Hairi and his boss, Commander Darwin.

The reverse side of the lunch box shows Baron von Butcher, the Duchess, and another CHUMP villain.

Lancelot Link also had a band, The Evolution Revolution, which released one self-titled album (Dunhill/ABC Records, 1970) of psychedelic bubblegum pop music, with a cover design by Douglas Carr. [More info on Discogs] The typeface chosen for the band is Marschall (also known as Domingo), used in all caps.

Gatefold of Lancelot Link And The Evolution Revolution. Photography by Mike Marmer and Allan Sandler.

Title card from a music video. In the show, the band was introduced by Ed Simian, a riff on Ed Sullivan.

Le singe et l’ours (“the monkey and the bear”) is an ABC book, made with linocuts and letterpress by studio deux point deux. It has been printed in 45 signed and numbered copies.

In printing houses' slang, the printer is the bear, the monkey the typographer.

We use Antique Olive Nord and the light weight of Paris ND types for contrast, and opposite tones of fluo colors for opposite animals and universe.

Source: emanuelwiemans.com Emanuel Wiemans. License: All Rights Reserved.

Front cover of New Cool Collective’s Electric Monkey Sessions, 2014. [More info on Discogs]

Amsterdam-based illustrator Emanuel Wiemans designed the cover art for the two Electric Monkey Sessions records by Dutch jazz group New Cool Collective.

For the first volume released in 2014, Wiemans made an illustration of three mandrills in suits, apparently about to the enter the stage, exchanging impish looks. The typography is composed with Ed Interlock. A masterpiece of design and technology, this font was designed by Ken Barber with Ed Benguiat. It is based on Benguiat’s Newlock, originally drawn for Photo-Lettering in the 1960s. Tal Leming accounted for the technical implementation which enables the automatic glyph substitution, with some letters extending over and under their neighbors. Wiemans combined the interlocking feature with a stacked-and-justified setting for a solid block of letter goodness. The track list on the back cover uses another typeface from the Ed Benguiat Font Collection by House Industries, Ed Brush.

Emanuel Wiemans. License: All Rights Reserved.

Back cover with the track list in Ed Brush.

Source: www.emanuelwiemans.com Emanuel Wiemans. License: All Rights Reserved.

Front cover of New Cool Collective’s Electric Monkey Sessions 2, 2017. [More info on Discogs]

For the second volume, the three mandrills find themselves in the nocturnal jungle. This time, the title is set in SpinOut, a “wacky 50s psychedelica” face from Shamfonts. It was designed by lettering artist and sign painter Shamrock, who, like Wiemans, is at home in Amsterdam. The Tiki-style SpinOut has a matching inline sans companion named SpinOff. The font used for the band name and the back cover is Eubie Script by Dai Foldes.

Source: www.juno.co.uk Emanuel Wiemans. License: All Rights Reserved.

Back cover with the track list in Eubie Script.

Source: www.emanuelwiemans.com Emanuel Wiemans. License: All Rights Reserved.

Digipack with CD.

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Release poster ft. Ed Brush for the tour dates.

Cover art using Lazybones from “The Laidlaw Reading Program” series, primarily published between the early 1970s and early 80s. Each hardcover book seen here was paired with an accompanying paperback workbook where students would answer questions, complete rhymes, alphabetize lists, and write sentences. Written by Kathleen B. Hester and William Eller.