From Rockasteria:

Frost was one of the most popular Michigan bands of the late 1960’s. Led by guitarist, singer, and songwriter extraordinaire, Dick Wagner, the group seemed poised to achieve national recognition with a collection of songs that were both heavy and tuneful. But they were saddled with a record company that undercut the band’s recordings with inadequate distribution and a lack of promotion that, as a result, severely hampered the band’s attempts to break big outside of Michigan.

Their debut 1969 album Rock and Roll Music, with art direction credited to Fred Holtz, uses a photograph taken by Andrew C. Pearch with Photo-Lettering’s Doret Shaded for the band name. The shaded all-caps design was drawn by Michael Doret for a Cooper Union class assignment under Robert Haas in 1966 and shown in PLINC's One Line Manual of Styles in 1971. The album name below is in another PLINC typeface that hasn’t been featured here before: Williamson Piper.

The back cover and gatefold use a mix of Helvetica and Alternate Gothic. The Vanguard logo is in Jana.

[More info on Discogs]

Back cover

Gatefold

Detail of Doret Shaded

Discogs files this record by Jeff Monn under “Psychedelic rock” but it looks like this is mostly due to the artwork. Most songs are romantic, poppy, and bordering on easy listening. The arrangements by Peter Schickele try to add some much needed melodic bass, soul horns and occasional psychedelic organs to keep the listener from dozing off. The second song on the B-side, “I can understand your problem” has a different sound – evoking psychedelic rock bands like The Doors – and maybe this is the song that inspired designer Jules Halfant to craft a swirling psychedelic collage for the album cover.

Cover photography by Len Baumann.

[More info on Discogs]

This album with Polish folk songs was recorded by the Mazowsze Choral Ensemble and Orchestra and released on Vanguard Records in 1958. From Discogs:

Mazowsze (in Polish “Państwowy Zespół Ludowy Pieśni i Tańca ‘Mazowsze’” – “State Folk Group of Song and Dance ‘Mazowsze’”) is a famous Polish folk ensemble founded in November 1948, named after the Mazowsze region of Poland.

Under the leadership of Professor Tadeusz Sygietyński, their first public performance was in 1950. After his death in 1955, his wife, Mira Zimińska-Sygietyńska, took over leadership duties – a position she held until her own death in 1997.

The typeface used for the title is Weiss, used with alternating glyph colors. It’s combined with Weiß-Initialen II. The cover photography is credited to Ray Solowinski and Jules Halfant. Halfant – the art director of Vanguard – probably was in charge of the typography, too.

[More info on Discogs]

Third studio album by Canadian folk and country music duo Ian & Sylvia. Sylvia Fricker and Ian Tyson began performing together in 1959, married in 1964, and divorced and stopped performing together in 1975. Northern Journey was released with Vanguard Records in 1964. It includes “Someday Soon”, which was subsequently recorded by a numerous artists and in 2010 was honored as one of the “Top 100 Western Songs” of all time.

For the cover, art director Jules Halfant used a photograph by Barry Feinstein and two styles from Hal Fiedler’s eponymous Gothic, with an ampersand that’s either custom or from an unidentified didone. The yellow text at the bottom is in Microgramma, the credits in Trade Gothic Extended.

[More info on Discogs]

VMP (a.k.a. Vinyl Me, Please) released The Story of Vanguard, a box set presenting “a story told through six albums of peerless folk, with an eye towards historical accuracy and faithful mastering.” The vinyl albums in the set were lacquered from the original master tapes of Vanguard Records, a label known for both the music library of its 1950s–60s heyday, as well as for its memorable cover designs created under the art direction of Jules Halfant.

Designer Clay Conder paid homage to that history with dramatic use of Ballast and sparing subheads in Franklin Gothic Condensed. VMP’s house typeface Studio carries the main running text (printed in blue!) for the booklet of extensive liner notes.

Clay Conder shared these comments by email:

Since the aim of this project was to bring the wonderful Vanguard catalog of 50s and 60s folk music to a new, modern audience, I wanted a font that felt fitting for that era, but with a quirkiness that brought it into the current day. For that, Ballast was the perfect fit. It has all the elements of a classic slab serif like Egyptienne Bold Condensed, but with fun fresh touches that I really enjoyed playing with.

Source: www.ebay.com jackassretro. License: All Rights Reserved.

Songs of the Auverge (1961). [More info on Discogs]

Two decorated faces from the mid 20th century, in use on the covers of Songs of the Auvergne, arranged by Joseph Canteloube (1879–1957) and sung in the Auvergne dialect by soprano Netania Davrath (1931–1987), accompanied by an orchestra conducted by Pierre de la Roche.

The first release from 1961 features Aldo Novarese’s cheerful Tuscan Fontanesi (Nebiolo, 1954), the second volume from 1963 has the rare Ornata, an open and shaded roman decorated with mid-height stars and a fishbone pattern, designed by Oskar H. W. Hadank for Klingspor in 1943.

The cover art for both records is by Jules Maidoff (b. 1933), probably with art direction by Jules Halfant.

Source: www.ebay.com jackassretro. License: All Rights Reserved.

Songs of the Auverge, vol. 2 (1963). [More info on Discogs]

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

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

The cover for Alfred Brendel’s recording of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies combines a vivacious illustration of a folk dance with equally wild display typography. Weiss is paired with all-caps Crayonette and Saphir. The numbers of the included rhapsodies are set in yet another flamboyant face, Fontanesi. In sum, there’s too much going on. I feel the illustration could shine more with a less eclectic typography. While the cover art is by Frederic Marvin (1932–2013), the overall design is uncredited. It may have been provided by Vanguard’s art director, Jules Halfant.

[More info on Discogs]

The back cover is set in Times New Roman, with the title in Bulmer.

Last Sessions is an album by country blues singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt (1893–1966). It was recorded at a Manhattan hotel in February and July 1966, and released in 1972 by Vanguard Records. Design by Jules Halfant, with photography by David Gahr (cover) and Dick Waterman (back).

The display typeface is Broadway, here with an unusual form of quote marks (like ❞❝, but mirrored) around the title. The track list and credits on the back were set on IBM’s Selectric Composer and feature the proprietary Theme in Bold and Italic styles, as well as the IBM Selectric version of Univers.

The images show a pressing from the UK, manufactured and distributed by RCA Limited, with the sleeve printed by Howards Printers (Slough) Ltd.

[More info on Discogs]

A use of the Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar custom lettering for this debut album from Circus Maximus on Vanguard Records. While not specifically credited on the album, Jules Halfant was the art director for the label from 1953 to 1988. The photograph is by Joel Brodsky.

The typeface is named for the East Village nightclub that booked various acts—the most noted being The Velvet Underground—in order to create multi-media events. According to liner notes from a compilation release by Craft Recordings:

First operating as The Lost Sea Dreamers (thereby providing a useful acronym for the times), (Circus Maximus) signed to Vanguard on the heels of a residency at the city's fashionable Electric Circus —Alec Palao, compilation producer and liner note author

The band featured in the Electric Circus’ December “Electric Christmas” concerts at Carnegie Hall (see poster) as well, so it makes sense that they would not have had any trouble adopting this face for their debut album which was released in autumn of 1967.

[More info on Discogs]

Debut album by jazz fusion group The Eleventh House, led by the guitarist Larry Coryell. The cover design is by Jules Halfant (1909–2001) who served as the art director of Vanguard Records from 1953 to 1988. The typeface he chose is Busorama. Drawn by Tom Carnase and produced at Photo-Lettering, the Art Deco-ish geometric sans was released in 1970 as one of the first typefaces by ITC. It comes with a large number of alternates, some of which were used here, like the narrower E, or the H with protruding crossbar. The latter is a bit of a strange choice, as it causes spacing issues in “THE” and “HOUSE”. My hunch is that Halfant used Letraset’s adaptation of Busorama Bold, which came exclusively with this form of H.

The artwork is by Jacques Wyrs. Halfant repeatedly worked with the multicolored paintings by the Paris-based artist for records by Coryell, see also Spaces (1974) or Planet End (1975).

[More info on Discogs]

On the back cover, the band name is shown in reversed Skin & Bones, with the names of the members in Century Expanded. The track list uses Melior.

First released in 1970 with a different cover, this is Jules Halfant’s design as used for the second pressing from France, issued in 1974 on Vanguard Records. The type shown reversed on the psychedelic painting by Jacques Wyrs features Aki Lines for the title and ITC Bernase Roman for credits, the latter with one of its double-storey a forms and the alternate descending C. The Vanguard logo uses Jana.

See also Introducing The Eleventh House (1974).

[More info on Discogs]

Country Joe & The Fish were very successful in San Francisco’s late 60s psychedelic rock scene. Protest song (and B-side on this release) “The Fish Cheer” was one of the group’s best known tracks and it actually got them barred from the Ed Sullivan Show right before a scheduled performance. The band performed at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock added even more to their legend.

This is the sleeve of a German single release, featuring tightly spaced Kabel Black. See the artwork for Trey Gruber’s 2019 releases for a contemporary revisitation of a similar aesthetic. In the use shown here, Kabel Black is used with unusually high hyphens and stylistically incongruous apostrophes.

“The first music for easy listening ever recorded on the Moog”

Discogs contributor philbeard:

Brain-destroying all-time great moog masterpiece, featuring very original arrangements of a load of hackneyed old standards, which are transformed into still-ahead-of-their-time-sounding lysergic trips, cut ’n pasted together with the precision of Double Dee & Steinski. Just for a start, check out the low-slung unheralded jeepbeat classic interpretation of “Flight of the Bumblebee” … I’m being entirely serious!

Source: www.joesalbums.com Joe’s Albums (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

Greatest hits compilation by American psychedelic rock band Country Joe & The Fish, released in December 1969 by Vanguard, a few months before the group disbanded.

The album cover represents the earliest use of Ginger Snap on Fonts In Use so far, and arguably also the most spectacular one. The typeface was designed by Craig Mierop for Photo-Lettering, Inc. and is shown in their Alphabet Yearbook 1969. Here it is accompanied by another 1960s classic, Louis Minott’s Davida (1965), which, unlike Ginger Snap, enjoys popularity to this day. The letterforms were not directly derived from film, but redrawn and enhanced with a perspective 3-D effect to become an integral part of David Byrd’s art. In the line at the bottom, E and A were modeled after Davida’s alternates (which are sadly absent from the digital versions); S got a higher waist, and most letters — especially H — were made a tad wider.

Art direction: Jules Halfant. Art by David Byrd. Photo by Joel Brodsky.

Source: www.joesalbums.com Joe’s Albums (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

A Night In The Tropics composed by Louis Moreau Gottschalk / Latin-American Symphonette composed by Morton Gould; played by the Utah Symphony Orchestra.

Vanguard Stereolab Records/USA (1963). Recorded December, 1962, at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT — Discogs

1968 re-release, Vanguard Everyman Classics

Painting by Eric Von Schmidt