A broadsheet fanzine published by Badrock Design. Each issue features one of the London clubs frequented regularly by the Beatles at the height of their fame in the 1960s. Clubs such as the Ad-Lib, the Bag O'Nails, the Scotch of St James amongst others, were the centre of music, art and fashion in London during a period of creativity and optimism in the 60s. Intrigued by George Harrison's much quoted repost when he left the band during the filming of Let it Be, the publications aim to summon up the little documented, tight world of clubs attended by the movers and shakers of the time.

Each issue recreates the graphic language of its subject, changing from issue to issue to capture the atmosphere and experience of each unique establishment. From Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back:

Friday 10 January 1969
George: I’m leaving the band now.

John Lennon: When?

George: Now.
Get a replacement. Place an ad in NME and get a few people.
See you round the clubs…

Meet the Beatles! is the first U.S. album by The Beatles on Capitol Records, released on January 20, 1964. This album served as the American introduction to the band, featuring hits like “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “I Saw Her Standing There”, and “All My Loving”. Unlike its UK counterpart, With the Beatles, this release emphasized original compositions by Lennon–McCartney and marks the beginning of Beatlemania in the United States.

The album cover features the now iconic half-lit portrait of the band, photographed by Robert Freeman. The typography prominently uses Venus Extended. The iconic design became one of the most recognizable album covers of the 1960s.

[More info on Discogs]

The back cover additionally features various styles from News Gothic and a band description in Century Expanded.

Japanese pressing on Odeon Records

This is a wild one. In 1972/73, a record company known as Audio Tape, Inc issued two pirated vinyl box sets containing music from various Beatles albums without any credits, in an attempt to exploit the Sound Recording Amendment of 1971.

From Discogs:

The “Alpha Omega” box set was a pirate/illegal collection of Beatles recordings sold in a four-part 8-track collection and 4LP box set in 1972. It also included several then-contemporary solo tracks, and was advertised in print, on TV, and radio, and sold via mail order. This compilation was sourced from American Capitol LPs featuring the Dave Dexter, Jr. edits found exclusively on those albums – compression, bass reduction, and additional reverb. Some of the tracks were edited haphazardly; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band fades out early, for example.

Either a group or person titled Art Wing designed the cover, which uses Charles Papirtis’s Pink Mouse shaded “E” style, issued in 1970 by Photo-Lettering, with News Gothic used for the back titles. Alternate colored sleeves were produced along with single color ones. CD releases were also produced further in time with the same full-colored cover design.

Cover with color

Releases without “ΑΩ”, includes the numerals 1 and 2 for Pink Mouse

Detail

CD release

The Beatles ’65 album was issued in the United States and Canada in December 1964, just in time for Christmas. It includes eight of the fourteen songs from Beatles for Sale, supplemented by “I’ll Be Back”, which was omitted from the US version of the previous Hard Day’s Night, plus both sides of the single “I Feel Fine” / “She’s a Woman”.

[More info on Discogs]

Back cover with liner notes and track list set in Century Expanded. The captions underneath the other album covers are in Futura.

Stereo release

Tulo in all caps, in use on the sleeve of an Argentinian single release by The Beatles, with titles in Spanish: “No Es Ella Dulce” (“Ain’t She Sweet”) and “Llora Por Una Sombra” (“Cry for a Shadow”).

Tulo is a close copy of Seymour Chwast’s Art Tone Boot Black, distinguished by soft corners and lower stroke contrast, among other things.

[More info on Discogs]

This cover design was based upon the cover of the British “glamour” mag Parade from 1963. Since this FURORE issue has a feature about the year 1963 in pop the use of Amigo No. 1 seemed fitting.

FURORE #28 is available from furoremagazine.com.

From Neverbland:

Paul McCartney’s previous site was built over a decade ago, making content difficult to manage and the design was starting to feel dated. Our task was to reimagine all aspects of the site from his digital brand identity, through to new site structure, design, technology solutions, and build.

See the live website at paulmccartney.com. For more images, visit the websites of Pangram Pangram and Neverbland.

Style guide

Detail from the timeline page for the 1970s, with Neue World for the headline, Tiempos for text, and DM Sans for the navigation

Front cover of the UK release by Parlophone (PMC 7009)

From Wikipedia:

Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 5 August 1966, accompanied by the double A-side single “Eleanor Rigby” / “Yellow Submarine”. The album was the Beatles’ final recording project before their retirement as live performers and marked the group’s most overt use of studio technology to date, building on the advances of their late 1965 release Rubber Soul. It has since become regarded as one of the greatest and most innovative albums in the history of popular music, with recognition centred on its range of musical styles, diverse sounds and lyrical content. […]

Voormann’s artwork was part line drawing and part collage, using photographs mostly taken over 1964–65 by Robert Freeman. In his line drawings of the four Beatles (McCartney, Lennon, Harrison and Starr, clockwise from top-left), Voormann drew inspiration from the work of the nineteenth-century illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, who was the subject of a long-running exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966 and highly influential on fashion and design themes of the time. Voormann placed the various photos within the tangle of hair that connects the four faces. Turner writes that the drawings show each Beatle “in another state of consciousness”, such that the older images appear to be tumbling out from them.

The title on the front cover is set in caps from Grotesque No. 9.

[More info on Discogs]

Back cover of the UK release by Parlophone (PMC 7009), with a photo taken by Robert Whitaker during the filming at Abbey Road on 19 May. Here the title is rendered in caps from Placard, with the track names and credits set in several styles from Univers. The info at the bottom is set in the Venus series, including Condensed and Extended styles. The printer’s credit is in Gill Sans.

The spine lettering uses an extrabold weight of Gill Sans.

Front cover of the US release by Capitol Records (T 2576). Apart from the company’s logo, it is identical to the British version.

Back cover of the US release by Capitol Records (T 2576). For the North American market, Revolver was reduced to eleven songs, with the omitted three appearing on the June 1966 LP Yesterday and Today. The title isn’t set in Placard, but in the similar Anzeigen-Grotesk. The small bits use various styles from the Trade Gothic series.

Wall calendar for 2023

Risograph printed artwork for the 2023 edition of The Happy Club’s “Mix & Match Calendar”. For this calendar, buyers choose an artwork for each month from a large number of limited edition prints.

The calendar itself is set in GT Ultra Ultra and GT Ultra Median. The artwork for September on the calendar shown here is designed by Sebastian Berbig and set in Ohno Softie and Degular.

Full view artwork

Framed artwork

Risography raster details

Filmotype Mason for a 7″ EP with four songs by The Beatles – “A Hard Day’s Night”, “I Should Have Known Better”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “And I Love Her” – released by Odeon in Brazil in 1965. All repeating letters use the same glyphs.

The song names appear to be set in caps from the schmal fett style of Information.

[More info on Discogs]

Music store standup promotional display, United Kingdom, c. 1964/65

Paul McCartney plays a Hofner Original. Why don’t you?

Mid-1960s Höfner bass guitar advertisement featuring their best-known endorser, Paul McCartney of The Beatles.

Magazine advert by Sorkin Music Co. Inc., New York, in Down Beat, c. 1967

Deutsch Black and Helvetica fett on the sleeve of a Yugoslavian single from 1976 with “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”, two Beatles songs originally released in February 1967. The band members are depicted in the colorful uniforms known from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (although the songs were not included on that album). On the left: George Harrison, who would have turned 80 today.

[More info on Discogs]

All-caps Ad Lib is used for the album name, shown here with its TH ligature and alternates for E. Designed by Freeman Craw, this novelty typeface was issued by ATF just a few years earlier, in 1961. The smaller text is set in condensed and extended styles from the Venus family. Photography by Joe Covello / Black Star.

From Wikipedia:

The Beatles’ Second Album is the second Capitol Records album by the English rock band the Beatles, and their third album released in the United States including Introducing... The Beatles, which was issued three months earlier by Vee-Jay Records. Following its release in April 1964, The Beatles’ Second Album replaced Meet the Beatles! at number 1 on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the US.

[More info on Discogs]

The back cover appears to be using Craw Clarendon Condensed, amongst other typefaces.

The opportunity to design Paul McCartney's memoirs was a literal dream project. Like many people, I'm a fan of Paul McCartney, not just in his prolific collaboration with John Lennon, but many of his later songs, with Band on the Run being a favorite. Published by Liveright, Paul McCartney: The Lyrics is a 2 volume set that reaches 874 pages. Inside is a mix of lyrics and personal memories and mementos of his long musical career. There are two versions— one is a widely available standard edition, and the other is a limited signed and numbered edition of which only 175 were sold.

We generally try to incorporate a bespoke typeface into our projects, and this seemed like a good opportunity to design something exclusive for this project. The typeface came about via a stack of our sketched letterforms that had been sitting in a drawer for many years. We had a serif in mind that we wanted to produce but never had the opportunity to finish. A high contrast face with subtle flared serifs and hooked terminals. After designing a beta version of the face, and getting the approval from McCartney and his team, we worked with Omnibus to finalize the design and build out a small family of display and text styles to use throughout the books. This typeface, dubbed Rigby, after the first Beatles melody I can remember listening to, was paired with the lovely Mallory from Tobias Frere-Jones.

Four Beatles with sunglasses, with words set in an ultrageometric sans from New Zealand (Churchward Design, here probably Mecanorma’s version named Galaxy), and a display typeface of unclear provenance, both in all lowercase letters.

This face with the unusual weight distribution is shown as Santana in a Typeshop catalog from around 1977. It isn’t included in their 1973 catalog, though – nor in the 1974 catalog by Hollenstein, which would be an obvious source for wacky faces from that time and place. If you happen to know more about the origins of Santana, please let us know in a comment. [Mystery solved, see comments.]

Glyph set of Santana as shown in a Typeshop catalog from around 1977

Decca version

This album with easy listening covers of Beatles songs was recorded by Frank Chacksfield and His Orchestra, and released in the Phase 4 Stereo series by Decca (UK) and London Records (US) in 1970.

The title typeface is Benguiat Cooper Black Swash, Ed Benguiat’s extraheavy rendition of Cooper Black. It was added to Photo-Lettering’s library around the time the album came out. The specific style used here is the “E” – upright and open with a drop shadow, filled with a multicolored pattern. In supporting roles: Akzidenz-Grotesk Condensed for the name, News Gothic for the song titles, and Futura for “Phase 4 Stereo”.

If you’re into colorful Cooper Black, check out the cover of the soundtrack for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which likewise was designed at Farmlett, Barsanti & Associates.

[More info on Discogs]

Detail

London Records version

In this highly referential poster, Akiko Stehrenberger plays off the psychedelic 1960s artwork of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine to create a poster featuring, well… a yellow Philly Cheesesteak and the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

In sticking with the Yellow Submarine formula, Stehrenberger uses the font Amelia, cut out from a blue sky.

The result is as zany and fun as both Always Sunny and Yellow Submarine.

The poster as reporoduced in Akikomatic: The Work of Akiko Stehrenberger, Hat & Beard Press, 2019

Czechoslovak posters for the 1964 musical comedy film A Hard Day’s Night directed by Richard Lester. The film starring The Beatles was first released in Czechoslovakia in 1965, titled Perný den (“busy day”), announced by a poster designed by Karel Vaca. The shown posters are for a later re-release, though: they were made in 1978 by Czech photographer and graphic designer Pavel Jasanský (1938–2021).

Jasanský used ITC Avant Garde Gothic, exclusively in caps from two weights, with appropriately tight spacing and a custom thin and flat acute accent. “Beatles” features a special EA pair – it’s one of several capital ligatures included in the typeface design by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase.

Mini poster (A4 / 12″×8″), with copy set in Vega by Stanislav Maršo.

Double-sided poster (front)

Double-sided poster (back)

Decimal Medium is used to introduce main subjects.

The 3-part docuseries The Beatles: Get Back, directed by Peter Jackson, takes viewers back in time to a pivotal point in the history of the titular band. As the series is mostly made up of 60+ hours of restored footage from 1969, the type system employed by Julian Hills mostly reflects that.

Hills selected popular typefaces of the era, like Univers, Futura Condensed, Venus Extended and ITC Avant Garde Gothic, and mixed them with a few new typefaces like Decimal from Hoefler & Co and Corbert Wide from The Northern Block. The result is a sans bananza, mixing new styles and old, quiet voices and loud, much like the documentary's mop top subjects.

Univers 55 Roman is used for titles and subtitles.

Avant Garde Gothic Medium Italic is used for song titles, paired with Decimal Medium for the names of the song writers.

On a calendar of 1969 used to frame the timeline, information is typeset in Venus Extended and Futura Condensed.

ITC Avant Garde Gothic Bold and Univers 63 Bold Extended are used in additional situating text.

Corbert Wide Black is used sparingly for tertiary titles.

Source: produto.mercadolivre.com.br License: All Rights Reserved.

In the 1930s, Italian type designer Alessandro Butti came up with a clever idea to create a new eye-catching display typeface. The best thing: it didn’t require a whole lot of effort to produce. For Landi Echo, he took the capitals of Landi tonda nera – which was Nebiolo’s name for Welt-Antiqua halbfett, a bold low-contrast slab serif originally from Ludwig & Mayer – and added oblique thin letterforms as an inline. The result is a scintillating motion effect.

Source: twitter.com Typographicall (cropped). License: All Rights Reserved.

Glyph set for Landi Echo, as shown in a Nebiolo specimen. Image courtesy of Jan Middendorp.

I suspect that this decorative variant was made by cutting right into the existing metal type. Such a time-saving approach was not unheard of – other examples from the 20th century include Lutetia Open and Romulus Open, both engraved by Paul Rädisch under the direction of Jan van Krimpen at Enschedé, or Chisel by Robert Harling, executed by punchcutter H. Karl Görner at Stephenson Blake. Combining upright and italic letterforms in a single glyph was a novelty, though. At least I’m not aware of any earlier examples. Landi Echo was first cast by Nebiolo in 1939.

Filmotype must have loved the concept. In 1955, they added a very similar design to the catalog of fonts available for their phototypesetting machine, sorted into the “Novelty” range. Compared to Landi Echo, Filmotype Quartet is heavier, allowing the inline caps to slant more. As far as I can tell, Quartet’s underlying letterforms aren’t derived from an existing typeface. Stymie, Memphis, and Beton are similar, but none comes particularly close. The unknown designer went further than Butti, and also did a lowercase.

In 1967, Quartet was picked to set “THE BEATLES” on the Brazilian and Peruvian covers of the EP better known as The Beatles (No. 1). The song titles are added in Volta Bold and Egizio Condensed.

[More info on Discogs]

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-SA.

Quartet (bottom) copies the concept of Landi Echo (top), but not the letterforms in all their details. Unlike Butti’s typeface, it has a lowercase. Both designs were digitized by Claude Pelletier, in 2011 and 2012, respectively. His fonts were used for setting this sample.

Source: www.popsike.com Popsike. License: All Rights Reserved.

The same typographic design was used together with a different image for a Peruvian pressing.

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

Another version of unclear origin (apparently also from Brazil), again with a different photo