The Working Brain is an introduction to neuropsychology, written by Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria as a concise adjunct volume to his magnum opus, Higher Cortical Functions in Man from 1962. It was translated to the English by Basil Haigh for Penguin Books in 1973. Shown here is the cover of the US paperback edition by Basic Books.

The uncredited cover designer built a wall of type by repeating the title over and over. The chosen typeface is Bob Newman’s Turtle (Letraset, 1971), prominently featuring its unique nested W. Turtle apparently was chosen because its letterforms are reminiscent of convolutions of the brain.

Nick Curtis made a digitization as Turtellini NF (2011). Last year, Raphaël de La Morinerie and Ethan Nakache released their digital interpretation of Turtle under the name Reptil.

Trevor Dearing (1933–2023) was a Charismatic Anglican priest who wrote eighteen books, including this one about miraculous healing through faith. For the cover, designer Cynthia Sahlman build a wall of type from the Heavy and Regular weights of ITC Serif Gothic. The display typeface by Herb Lubalin and Tony Di Spigna is used in all caps, featuring the alternate uncialish E.

From Wikipedia:

At Carnegie Hall is a jazz live album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It was recorded at the famed Carnegie Hall in New York City on Friday, February 22, 1963. Critic Thom Jurek described it as “one of the great live jazz albums of the 1960s” […]

The title is rendered in tight-not-touching caps from Fiedler Gothic, a typeface drawn by Hal Fiedler for Photo-Lettering not too long before the album’s release. It’s shown in PLINC’s 1965 catalog in a range of widths and weights (see further below), with various alternates. Its use on this album cover inspired Austrian type designer David Einwaller to draw a digital interpretation which he released in 2020 as Brubeck.

With George Simon’s liner notes printed on the front (in Century Expanded), this album represents an addition to our “text on cover” tag.

Horn/Griner is credited for the cover photo. Steve Horn and Norm Griner started out in 1959 as a graphic design firm and ventured into photography a little later. It’s unclear whether they had a hand in the album’s typography as well. If not, it probably was done in-house at Columbia Records, under the supervision of John Berg who in 1961 was appointed art director for packaging design.

[More info on Discogs]

Fiedler Gothic came in many styles. Shown here is an overview of the Semi-concensed and Expanded widths (in fact, the Condensed and normal weights, photographically extended), each in five weights.

The 1971 edition of The Good Food Guide was issued by the publishers of Which?, the consumer protection magazine by the British organization of the same name. The cover was designed by Banks and Miles, using Pop Up, supported by Univers Condensed.

The crop-and-repeat move is a technique that modernist typographers keep coming back to since the late 1960s. Perhaps the most striking execution – if you want to fill an entire page with type – is the crop-and-repeat that starts from both the top and bottom and ends with a complete title in the center. So far, our earliest example of this on Fonts In Use is Mencken by Carl Bode, designed by George Lenox in 1969. This exhibition catalog cover by Jacqueline Casey is the second. Once you open the wrapper to reveal the back cover, you see Casey took the technique even further, continuing the repeat in the lateral direction.

A profile of Casey from Display, where I just acquired this item for Letterform Archive’s collection:

Casey headed MIT’s Office of Design Services from 1955 to 1989 where she and her colleagues played a critical role in popularizing functional Modernism and the International Typographic Style in the USA. “My work combines two cultures: The American interest in visual metaphor on the one hand, and the Swiss fascination with planning, fastidiousness, and control over technical execution on the other.”

She designed the poster (see last image) for this exhibition of which she said: “Golub used strong, sweeping, horizontal brushstrokes. I wanted the type to respond to his technique and the colors to his sober subject matter.”

In the Paris office of Fonts Ninja, a striking typographic wall features the Angela typeface from Newglyph. This design choice perfectly aligns with Fonts Ninja’s focus on typography and design.

The 1977 Alphabet Yearbook celebrates “Photo-Lettering, Inc.’s 40th year of service to the advertising and graphic arts industry”: the New York phototypesetting company founded by Ed Rondthaler first opened its doors for business in 1936.

The Yearbook was designed by Ed Benguiat, PLINC’s Type Director, with assistance from Tom Vasiliow. Most pages comprise the usual mix of one-line samples and exemplary settings. For page 99, though, the designers had some fun, and did a parody of the opening lines of The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, a.k.a. the United Stated Declaration of Independence, from July 4, 1776:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to use bicentennial alphabets, Photo-Lettering Incorporated presents the largest selection available. We hold these alphabet styles to be

After thirteen lines – one for each of the founding states – the continuous sample text breaks off, but it’s self-evident how it continues.

Benguiat and Vasiliow used eleven styles from nine typefaces, all set in all caps, stacked and justified. Some of the more topical alphabets with stars and stripes were issued in the late 1960s, possibly in anticipation of the United States Bicentennial in 1976. Others are much older: Eighteen Ninety, Carousel and Eventide go back to the first half of the 20th century. The oldest design is Algonquin – it was first cast by the Dickinson Type Foundry in Boston around 1888.

From top to bottom, the featured styles are:

Brave and Free (uncredited, possibly derived from an existing plain style, before 1970)
Pacella Cobbler Shaded A (Vincent Pacella, late 1960s)
Cavanagh Eighteen Ninety (John Albert Cavanagh, before 1950, stretched)
Gonzales Pioneer Shaded (Francisco Gonzales, 1969)
Pacella Cobbler (Vincent Pacella, late 1960s)
Davison Carousel G (Dave Davison, before 1950)
Papirtis Washington (Charles Papirtis, 1967)
Pacella Monitor (Vincent Pacella, a variant of Cordina with stars and stripes, c.1968)
Carlyle Eventide (Paul Carlyle, c.1938)
Gonzales Pioneer A (Francisco Gonzales, 1969)
Algonquin Shaded (a.k.a. Algonquin Ornamented, John F. Cumming, c.1888)

Condensed Title Gothic No. 11 in red and blue and with inline images for a best-of compilation by Pérez “King of the Mambo” Prado (1916–1989), released in 1960. Tony Wilds reviewed Big Hits by Prado for AllMusic:

Big Hits actually is a powerhouse anthology: the first definitive, stereo collection of mambo hits. All were re-recorded for stereo in “new arrangements” as the jacket advertises. A couple originally were recorded in stereo, e.g., “Patricia” and “Why Wait,” but were not available in stereo, even as late as 1960. The most desirable selections are “Guaglione” and “Paris”; the latter may have been non-LP until this (Francis Bay covered it to even greater effect). Overall, the presentation is not as strong as it could be. A later issue has the tunes in different order and with the trademark organ mixed higher. Still, Big Hits is easy to find and very worthwhile.

[More info on Discogs]

The large grot caps on the back cover appear to be Plain Gothic No. 6011. Watson Wylie’s liner notes and the track list are set in News Gothic. Additional fonts include Franklin Gothic and Century Expanded.

An advertisement for Alfieri & Lacroix designed by Franco Grignani. Scanned from Gebrauchsgraphik 04, 1962, and posted at Design Reviewed along with more of Grigani’s ads for Alfieri & Lacroix and the following intro:

Alfieri & Lacroix was established in 1896 by Emilio Alfieri and Edoardo Lacroix. The company was based in Milan and specialised in fine art printing. […]

In the early 1950s, Alfieri & Lacroix sought an advertising campaign to boost their business and establish themselves as a leader in the Italian printing industry. To achieve this, Morani commissioned Franco Grignani, a designer and collaborator of Studio Boggeri, granting him the freedom to innovate with typography, photography, and illustration.

Grignani’s task was unique. As Raimondo Hrabak noted in Gebrauchsgraphik issue No. 4, 1962, “Grignani neither had to promote the product nor the name of his client, but his only task was to demonstrate the whole variety of possibilities and applications which the technical facilities of his client’s modern enterprise offer the artist.” This approach allowed Grignani to explore and push the boundaries of design, resulting in exceptional and acclaimed work characterised by Grignani’s distinct design aesthetic and innovative perspective.

Hanje is paired with what looks like Hiragino Kaku Gothic on this poster series for the 24th anniversary of German techno club Robert Johnson.

La Ciudad (“The City”) is the Spanish edition of a book by the editors of Scientific American, translated from the English by Guillermo Gayá Nicolau. The shown paperback was published by Alianza Editorial in 1969 in their series “El Libro de Bolsillo. Sección Ciencia y Técnica”.

Cover designer Daniel Gil chose a typeface that was among the ones offering the tightest packing at the time: Permanent Headline (1964) by Karlgeorg Hoefer. Especially in all caps, it’s similar to Walter Haettenschweiler’s Schmalfette Grotesk (1954) and Matthew Carter’s Helvetica Extra Compressed (1966), but can be distinguished by a number of details. For example, counters in O or R are even narrower, the waist of R and the middle in E sit lower, and the diagonal of N is heavier.

With the text arranged in five tightly spaced lines, stacked and justified, Gil could fill the letterforms with an aerial photograph of a city – without losing too much of the pictorial information.

The spine lettering is in Cooper Black.

This is the 1972 paperback edition of André Breton's Manifestoes of Surrealism. I believe the interior to be the same as the hardcover, but I don't know for sure. (As with the hardcover, the book design is credited to Quentin Fiore.)

The cover uses skewed Helvetica Compressed [see comments] for the author's name, and Inserat-Grotesk for the book title. The decorative dingbat is picked up from the hardcover design, and skewed to match the new type. Also, like the hardcover, note the unusual solution for the accent on the E in André, this time using a line parallel to the top bar of the E.

The interior of the book is notable for its use of a different text face for each section.

The title page spread uses Sans Shaded for the title and Anzeigen Grotesk for the author's name. The translator credits are in Bodoni Italic, and the publisher names are in Helvetica Medium.

The copyright page is in Times New Roman Italic, and the table of contents is in Helvetica.

The section openers are set in Bodoni Bold.

The texts are set in a mix of Baskerville, Century Expanded, Helvetica, and Bodoni Bold.

Within the first manifesto is “Poem,” randomly assembled from headlines and scraps of headlines, reset in many typefaces, including Cheltenham, Baskerville, Vulcan Bold Italic (see Greco, Latin Bold and Latin Wide, Windsor Bold, Beton Bold, and Clarendon.

Designer Woody Woodward was into type-only album covers. We previously featured one such designs of his, made in 1963 for The De-Fenders, with Inserat-Grotesk.

The cover shown here is from the year before, for an album by Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers originally released in 1957. It’s combined with a session recorded by the Elmo Hope Quintet featuring saxophonist Harold Land in October 1957. Woodward used Grotesque No. 9 Italic and repeated the title five times, building a mesmerizing wall of type. You can listen to the music on the Internet Archive.

[More info on Discogs]

The track list on the back is set in News Gothic Bold, with Kaufmann Bold for the headings. The roman used for John William Hardy’s liner notes is a bit too small to identify.

The Macao Design Week is a yearly event held in Macao, China. It is organized by the Macau Designers Association (MDA) which was founded in 1986, while the city was still under Portuguese rule and spelled according to Portuguese orthography. Sparked by the felt need to propagate design as a discipline, to further its public awareness and to improve on the local designer’s education, MDA, over a period of more than 30 years, unfolded an incredible range of activities.

What started as the Macau Design Biennial in 1994 meanwhile turned into the Macau Design Award, and other, theme-based competitions and exhibitions were initiated starting in 2004. In 2015 MDA even managed to open the Macau Design Centre. That same year the Macao Design Week was organized for the first time.

In sum, the association worked hard to turn Macao into a regional hub for interchange and networking in the field of design, reaching out today to the wider Asian area and an international public.

The 2019 edition of the Design Week invited Portuguese designers to exhibit their work alongside that of participants from Macao. The visuals promoting the event were designed by Untitled Macao, a local design agency founded in 2017. Their concept is based on four 3D-generated shapes and radiant colors, orange and green, exactly those that can give headaches in print. But they excelled at it!

The impact of the posters is further boosted by the typeface used: it is Minotaur Beef, designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée and available from Production Type. It is characterized by straight lines in places where you wait for curves, expressive ink traps and unexpected, bold solutions. The graphic designers at Untitled Macao took special care and developed a custom lettering style for the Chinese text that picks up on these devilish features in order to bring heavenly harmony to the typography.

Design: Untitled Macao
Video production: Mirage Visuals 蜃海視覺
Director: Puzzle Lai 賴明德
3D animation: Pancy Ng 吳穎儀

Festival Vento is a music festival with the purpose of showing culture as a powerful agent of social transformation. The typography uses GT America in three styles: Regular, Bold and Compressed Black.

For more info and images, visit the website of the 2021 edition.

Photo: OH!MANA Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: OH!MANA Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: OH!MANA Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: OH!MANA Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: OH!MANA Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: OH!MANA Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: OH!MANA Studio. License: All Rights Reserved.

Cover for the 1991 Accolade, Inc. computer game software catalog, featuring a mix of seemingly incompatible fonts, which was a popular post-modern trend in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From Wikipedia:

Accolade, Inc. (later Infogrames North America, Inc.) was an American video game developer and publisher based in San Jose, California. The company was founded as Accolade in 1984 by Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, who had previously co-founded Activisionin 1979. The company became known for numerous sports game series, including HardBall!, Jack Nicklaus and Test Drive.

Other type treatments found in the catalog’s interior pages can be seen at the Internet Archive.

Example of the Interior pages of the catalog. The justified, multi-colored text on the left page is Neue Helvetica 55 Roman. On the right page, “Golf” is ITC American Typewriter Medium Condensed, “NEW” is Compacta Light, the body and caption text is a mix between Neue Helvetica 57 Condensed and 77 Condensed Bold. (The text of the game – over the image of Jack Nicklaus – is Cheltenham Condensed, in caps with small caps.)

Lots of all-caps Franklin Gothic [edit: ITC Franklin Gothic, see comments], and nothing but all-caps Franklin Gothic, for a poster designed by Rudolph de Harak for Manhattan’s Grand Central Oyster Bar. The justified text block simply lists the various types of oysters served in the established seafood restaurant, in alternating word colors, without spaces (or line breaks).

The date of this poster is unknown, but it must be from after 1991, when de Harak started using the services of the Borealis Press in Ellsworth, Maine, which provided the typesetting and printing.

De Harak (1924–2002) also designed the logo for the Oyster Bar, which is likewise multicolored, but with custom drawn angular letterforms. See the original illuminated sign (from 1974?) in a 1983 portfolio by Rudolph de Harak & Associates.

Digital and analog flyers for a free talk about Franklin Gothic on October 24, 2022, as part of Type@Cooper and The Lubalin Center’s Herb Lubalin Lecture Series at Cooper Union in New York City.

The flyers are set entirely in various weights and widths of HEX Franklin. The main title is set with the HEX Franklin Tyght variable font for extra-tight letterspacing, including an alternate set of non-overshooting round glyphs intended for similarly tight line spacing.

The physical flyers were printed on various Astrobrights papers in two variants: one with tear-off tabs along the bottom and one without.

The Parque de la Memoria – Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado, also known in English as Remembrance park, is a public space situated in front of the Río de la Plata estuary in Buenos Aires. It is a memorial to the victims of the 1976–83 military regime, a period of unprecedented state-sponsored violence in Argentina. From the official website:

Erected as a place of memory, it combines the force of a monument with the engraved names of the disappeared and murdered persons by the State’s repression, and the critical approach elicited by a work of contemporary art and direct visual contact with the river, silent witness to the fate of many of the victims. […]

This place of memory does not purport to close wounds or replace truth and justice, but rather to become a place of remembrance, homage, testimony and reflection. Its objective is to raise awareness in current and future generations that visit the site regarding the horrors perpetrated by the State, in view of the need to ensure that similar acts will never again occur.

Nora Hochbaum is the park’s general director, and Florencia Battiti the main curator.

The visual identity, art direction, and communication program was developed by Estudio Lo Bianco, Buenos Aires, using Perec and the stencil styles from Perec Ludique (PampaType, 2010–2020). Perec is a serial typeface inspired by the writings of French novelist Georges Perec – who devoted great part of his works to the idea of memory and remembrance; thus “W, or the Memory of Childhood”, dedicated to a person with the initial E, unfolds two stories in parallel: the first is the rewriting of a forgotten fictional story, entitled W and written by the author in his childhood; the second is an attempt by Perec to write his autobiography of those years, largely forgotten because of the ravages of World War II and the Holocaust.

Entrance to the park

Wall with a bilingual description of the park and its objective

Reception desk with the names of the park’s four focus areas shown in Perec Ludique Pochoir, with mid-word linebreaks

The park’s name in small caps from the bold weight, Perec Negra

Window lettering

Memorial wall with the names of victims of the state terror

Wall text in the park’s documentation center and digital archive

Website

Website

1968 paperback edition of The Colossus and other Poems by Sylvia Plath, published by Vintage Books.

The cover design, credited to Joe del Gaudio, features a purely typographic composition with “COLOSSUS” typeset in alternating orange and blue glyphs of Compacta. Each of the glyphs touches its neighbor and has its bottom edge extended downward off the page, creating a field of stripes defined by the width of each glyph. The rest of the title is set in Univers.

News Gothic is used on the spine, and testimonials on the back are set in Helvetica. Inside the book, the body type is set in Electra, with Bodoni used for titling.