Porto Rocha developed an evolution of the brand identity for Olympikus, introduced alongside the release of its CORRE 5 footwear line. Katalog Bold (Edito) is used throughout the system as the primary typeface, establishing a compact, assertive typographic voice.

The design studio describes the project as follows:

A new era of running begins for Olympikus. Alongside a bold brand identity evolution, Olympikus unveils its latest innovation: CORRE 5.

Proud to celebrate over six years of partnership and to witness Olympikus’ meteoric rise as Brazil’s leading and most beloved running brand.

This album with Italian-style music by guitarist Al Caiola (1920–2016) from New Jersey was released in 1960 by Roulette Records. The cover photograph shows the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

The title typeface is a so-called Tuscan, drawn in Switzerland and baptized with a Spanish name: it’s Alex Stocker’s Juanita, shown in the first volume of the Lettera book series from 1954. The accompanying wide slab serif probably has roots in Germany, where it was named Breite Egyptienne (“wide Egyptian”). It later got a name that suggests a perceived Greek look or origin, Hellenic Wide.

[More info on Discogs]

When founder and creative Abigail Stern came to us, asking to create the visual identity of Matek, we were thrilled to discover that we shared the same 100TB folder of retro ski references.

From that starting point it was easy to create a logotype and a symbol rooted in timelessness. For the tone of voice and typeface we pushed and revived a style of communication referencing the old ski resorts locations in the Alps from the early 1900s. At that time we were working on Zug Etc only as a single cut but soon thanks to this project we expanded and developed it into a full family of seven styles.

BAGEL magazine captures tennis’s increasing diversity, influence on fashion, and participation in popular culture. It shows off the sport in a contemporary light — through great graphic design, photography, stories and style. BAGEL will cover everything from the grassroots to the professionals, tour statistics to fashion shoots and coaching tips to tennis trips. Join us for the journey!

London-based, globally-minded BAGEL comes to you from editor Stuart Brumfitt (Fantastic Man, GQ Style, The Face, i-D), creative director Arnaud Milliquet (ATMA World), LTA tennis coach Julian Cirrone, and a team of talented contributors.

We contribute to the project by helping to craft their logo, with our typefaces Diagraph Etc, Diagraph Wide Etc, and Zug Etc, and by offering our visuals from our image bank.

This poster advertises a concert organized by Pure and Vibeonauts, called “Thrill Ride 98”. It took place on July 18th, 1998 in Chicago, USA.

The poster uses a mix of upper- and lower-case letters set in Aggie – an adaptation of Zürich. Some characters have also been made transparent, with a stroke added. “Pure” is either a customization of Aggie, or a similar design with rounded terminals. The event date, city, and description appear to be set in all-caps Eurostile.

Whatevershebringswesing is the third solo album by Kevin Ayers, released on Harvest Records.

In 1971, Kevin Ayers started recording what would become his most acclaimed album, Whatevershebringswesing accompanied by members of Gong and his previous backing band The Whole World. Praised by NME, Record Mirror and Rolling Stone, the album realized all the musical aspirations Ayers had harboured since the inception of Soft Machine.

As with most Ayers albums, a collision of disparate styles confronts the listener but in this instance they work to extremely powerful effect. The title track with Mike Oldfield’s guitar accompaniment and Robert Wyatt’s wracked harmonies would become a template for Ayers subsequent ’70s output.

The gatefold cover shows a basket full of eggs, tipped over, with human babies hatching from the eggs. On the back cover, “no eggsplanation” is offered. The sleeve design is credited to “Adrian Boot and unknown artist”. Boot later contributed photography to many other records. It’s not clear whether the Hieronymus Bosch-like painting is an early work of his, or if he used a found painting as the basis for a collage. While the title is set in all-lowercase Clarendon with no wordspaces, the artist’s name features the ever-mysterious Olivia. Designed by Alex Stocker for the first volume of Lettera (1954), the Victorian italic caps were adopted by Mecanorma for dry transfer lettering around the time the album was released.

[More info on Discogs]

Whoever made this adaptation of the cover design for a CD release forgot that type needs to have a certain amount of contrast in regard to the background. This is all the more true for the intricate Olivia.

A double Lettera feature for the Dutch sleeve of the “Come Together” single by the Beatles, the opening track from their Abbey Road album released in fall 1969.

The band name on the front is rendered in tall skeletal letters with triangular terminals. They are derived from a capital alphabet drawn by Swiss designer Armin Haab. It was reproduced in the second volume of the Lettera source book series, first published in 1961. The only major deviation from the model is the letter S, which has a downward-pointing triangle at the bottom in Haab’s design. The apertures were partly filled with white areas enlivened by a spot pattern, apparently to give the spindly letterforms a bit more heft and presence. Chances are that the uncredited sleeve designer picked this style for its name: Haab baptized his creation India. One year before, in 1968, the Beatles had travelled to Rishikesh in northern India, a visit that received widespread media attention.

On the back, “Beatles” is shown in shaded Tuscan caps with mid-height spurs. This case is less clear: Judging from the proportions, counters, and placement of spurs, I believe this started out with Juanita, a capital alphabet drawn by Alex Stocker for the first volume of Lettera from 1954. If that’s true, its bifurcated serifs were closed in this application, and the original thin split shade dropped in favor of a long close shade.

[More info on Discogs]

“Les Chevrons” / “Solstice” single (1972). [More info on Discogs]

Olivia was used for the second album and the accompanying single by Catharsis. At the time of the release in 1972, the psychedelic rock group from France consisted of Yves de Roubaix, Charles Eddi, Patrick Moulia, and band leader Roland Bocquet. First released without a title (like the debut LP from 1971), the album was reissued as Volume II Les “Chevrons” in 1975, after Catharsis scored a chart hit with the single “Les Chevrons”.

The exuberant italic Tuscan is a good equivalent for the largely instrumental (or rather lyrics-less) hippie music with a mesmerizing proto-Kraut (choucroute?) beat. You can read more about the wonderful Olivia in a previous post. Via oopswhoops, who comments: “It has often been said that Catharsis was largely inspired by Pink Floyd, let’s say that it is the best ‘scat vocal obsessed, guitarless, organ lead Pink Floyd wannabe’ I have ever listened to … No less!”

Album cover (front), Saravah, 1972. [More info on Discogs]

Gatefold of the original release on Saravah. The band name is here shown in Cloister.

Album cover of the reissue by Disques Festival, 1975. [More info on Discogs]

Jacques Darche, the art director of the Club français du livre, was always on the lookout for interesting and unusual letter styles suitable for his book designs. Unsurprisingly, he also tapped into Lettera, the Swiss series of alphabet source books started by Armin Haab and Alex Stocker in 1954.

For the title page sequence of Le désert des tartares, Darche worked with La Jeunesse. This design by Alex Stocker isn’t really a typeface and not even a full alphabet, but rather a piece of lettering, featuring bold wide slab-serif caps, shown in outline. Or, more precisely, what we see is nothing but the shadow cast by the outline – the ghost image of letterforms. It’s shown in the first volume of Lettera from 1954, with a text that reads “La jeunesse dorée de Baar les Bains”. Fortunately for Darche, this phrase contained all the letters necessary to spell out the French title of Dino Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari (English: The Tartar Steppe). La Jeunesse is reproduced in white against yellow – a typographic mirage in an endless sea of sand, which is demarcated only by straight dashed lines with no obvious meaning. It’s paired with an unidentified Clarendon credited as “égyptienne corps 9”.

Le désert des tartares was translated from Italian by Michel Arnaud and published by Le Club Français du Livre (vol. 184) in 1955.

Hanu Ancuţei (1973). The author’s name is set in Windsor Elongated. Olivia (and Lettres Ornées B) didn’t come with a Ț, so the designer added a custom comma accent made from some expendable letter part, possible the tail of a Q.

Covers for two radioplays recorded at Radio România and released by the national record label Electrecord. In both cases, designer Dimitrie Sbiera chose Olivia as the titling typeface.

Olivia is a 19th-century-style set of ornamented italic Tuscan caps. It’s shown in Lettera 1 (1954), the first volume of the Swiss series of alphabet source books, with the design credited to Alex Stocker. In or before 1971, the face was adopted by Mecanorma, the French manufacturer of dry-transfer lettering sheets. The Mecanorma version went under the name Lettres Ornées B. Lettres Ornées A was their adaptation of Gillé’s Lettres Ornées, Lettres Ornées C is Midolle’s Romaine Genre Arabesque. Unlike A and C, B disappeared from later Mecanorma catalogs. Did it sell poorly? Or was the adaptation unauthorized, and did Armin Haab, the editor of Lettera, send a cease and desist letter? See his comment on plagiarism from the preface to Lettera 4 which I’ve quoted in a previous post.

Hanu Ancuţei from 1973 [Discogs] is a dramatized adaptation of the novel of the same title, written in 1928 by Romanian author Mihail Sadoveanu (1880–1961). Cinel Cinel from 1976 [Discogs] is based on the works of Moldavian poet and playwright Vasile Alexsandri (1821–1890).

Thanks to the Herb Lubalin Study Center (and, by extension, to Nitzan Hermon) for pointing me to Dimitrie Sbiera’s work!

Cinel Cinel (1976). According to the blog by Biblioteca Naţională a Republicii Moldova, this record was released in 1984. This date probably refers to a reissue, as Dimitrie Sbiera emigrated to France in 1977. The secondary typeface is Aurora-Grotesk VII.

Cover for a 7″ vinyl single of the playful pop song “Happy Time”, with the similarly poppy “Clipper 404” as the B-side.

“Happy Time” was popularized in Germany in the 1960s from being played while lottery numbers were chosen from a lottery machine on TV – hence the design’s number jumble and shape of the glücksschwein (lucky pig).

While the pile of numerals looks random at first, there are a few cleverly placed glyphs to emulate pieces of the pig’s anatomy: a sideways 8 and 3 for a snout and eyes, respectively, rotated 7 for an ear, and a 6 for a curly tail.

The Japanese version of Ginger Baker’s Air Force’s cover of “Man Of Constant Sorrow” was manufactured by Nippon Grammophon Co., Ltd. The ultrawide technoid letterforms are from a film typeface of unclear origin. It appeared as Astrid in a Lettergraphics catalog from 1968. Ten years later, Castcraft listed it as “Aggie (similar to Astrid Solid)”. This name is also the one used for the digitally available versions, OPTI Aggie Solid and URW Aggie.

Edit: The original name is Zürich. It’s an alphabet designed by Alex Stocker and Hans Gruber for the first volume of Lettera (1954).

[More info on Discogs]

Louis XIV, a motorbike, and the sloping grandmother of Hobeaux Rococeaux? This unique combination made it into Jonny Trunk’s Top 10 selection from his Music Library, an anthology showcasing library music albums from around the world. From Wire:

It’s a French library LP, and belongs in a holding pen with a whole bunch of very small Paris based library companies that came and went very quickly in the mid-1970s. Everything about this image is wrong, which is why I put it on a tee shirt. The producer was JC Pierric (Real name JC Boinot), a man who tried all sorts of musical progressions for about a decade. To my knowledge, there is no Volume 2 for this. And incidentally, there is nothing about cats anywhere on this LP.

You can listen to one of the tracks on YouTube. The sleeve design is credited to Masq Atelier (Éditions musicales Masq). [Discogs]. An expanded edition of The Music Library was published in 2016 by Fuel.

The ornamented italic Tuscan used for “The Boss Music” presumably goes back to a 19th century design. It is shown in the Solotype catalog as Oliva and appears in Mecanorma’s Graphic Book #7 as 82B Lettres Ornées. In 1995, Alan Prescott digitized the set of caps as New Viola. I’d be curious to learn more about Oliva’s origins.

Resetting using New Viola