Front cover of the “Big Box” CD release for the Mac

A fediverse post showing the CD cover for The Incredible Machine 3 prompted me to write this up. The Incredible Machine, often abbreviated TIM, was a 1990s series of puzzle-solving computer games where players create a Rube Goldberg device. In fact, it seems to be responsible for creating the Rube Goldberg genre. The original TIM was published in 1993, and went on to spawn quite a few sequels, spin-offs, ports, and imitators.

TIM 3 is essentially a port of the DOS game TIM 2 to the GUI operating systems, principally Windows and Mac. The box art for TIM 3 uses Lithos and Modula Sans for the title, and Modular Sans for much of the secondary text. Two very iconic 1990s designs by two very iconic 1990s designers: Carol Twombly and Zuzana Licko respectively.

Artwork for the earlier versions relies on the obvious LTypi: ITC Machine. And since this is clearly a 1990s post, I had to show the interior of the manual for TIM 2 which features another landmark of the 1990s: Remedy.

Splashscreen for the original DOS version. Note the wordmark that’s based on modified ITC Machine.

The splashscreen for The Incredible Machine 2 is a much more straightforward LTypI.

Front cover of the manual for The Incredible Machine 2, using ITC Machine.

A right-hand page from the interior of the manual for The Incredible Machine 2, showing typical typography. Remedy is used throughout the manual for titles and subtitles.

Source: www.hardcoregaming101.net License: All Rights Reserved.

SNES cover with the tagline using ITC Stone Sans Bold Italic

Packy & Marlon is an edutainment game for Super Nintendo and Windows developed by WaveQuest and published by Raya Systems. The game was intended to improve self-care behaviour in children with type 1 diabetes. Per Hardcore Gaming 101:

Packy and Marlon are a pair of pachyderm pals attending a diabetic summer camp, but disaster strikes when all the food and medical equipment gets pillaged by rats. It’s up to you to explore the summer camp and rescue that equipment, which are hidden throughout 24 stages that you’ll need to explore by walking, jumping, climbing, and sometimes swimming. You can deal with the various enemies wandering around by jumping on them or shooting them with water, along with more powerful projectiles found in certain areas.

A very 90s game deserves a 90s font, and thus Remedy Double is used for the title on the box. A pixelated version is used throughout the game for headers and titles.

Packaging and graphics are credited to Lynn Griffes (Creative Director) and Randy Urquhart (Designer) at Griffes Advertising.

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

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

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

The 1998 Windows port. The tagline this time is set in Impact. The “Sponsored by the makers of” text is set in ITC Stone Serif Bold Italic.

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

The back cover for the Windows release. Blurb set in Helvetica Condensed Black.

A three-page magazine ad for Namco Museum Vol. 1, a collection of 1980s arcade games released in 1996 (1995 in Japan) for the Sony PlayStation. The ad pokes fun at the then-contemporary 1990s gaming culture, including the typography of video game ads.

The bulk of the text is in Resbaloso, with several other fonts mixed in: Crackhouse (“WEIRD TYPE”), Escalido Streak (“screaming guys”), Burnout (“ViRtUaL ReALitY”), Trajan (“CLICHÉS”), Nuptial Script (“self-righteous”), Matrix Tall (“MULTI-MILLION-DOLLAR”), Motion Bold (“Toilet”), and one unidentified font (“3D”).

The small legal text at the bottom of the last page is in Industria.

Jacket of the hardback edition, Viking Press, 2009

From Wikipedia:

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a book by American writer Rebecca Solnit, published by Viking Press in 2009. The book deals with the aftermath of disasters, challenging the traditional narrative of chaos and mass panic with evidence that people typically respond to disaster with altruism, solidarity, and mutual aid.

The cover typography features Grand Central Light by Tobias Frere-Jones, together with Frank Heine’s Tribute. The photograph is credited to David McNew / Getty Images. No cover designer is mentioned.

Paperback cover, Penguin, August 2010

A two-page ad for the game The Nomad Soul, found in LARA: The Official Lara Croft Magazine (1999). From Wikipedia:

The Nomad Soul (known as Omikron: The Nomad Soul in North America) is an adventure game developed by Quantic Dream and published by Eidos Interactive. It was released for Microsoft Windows in 1999 and Dreamcast in 2000. The player can engage in unarmed and armed combat, explore the three-dimensional environment of Omikron City, and talk with non-player characters to progress the story. It follows an investigation into a case of serial killings, which unravels the supernatural truth behind the city's ancient history.

BadDeni is used for the large “Have I been you somewhere before?” tagline, as well as the game’s web address. The smaller text at the bottom of each page is set in Amplifier.

Tiny legal text uses Helvetica. The Eidos web address is in Futura Condensed.

Armand Van Helden’s simple production style embodies the spirit of the 1990s – this cover fittingly combines two prime examples of Emigre’s “grunge fonts” era – Zuzana Licko’s Journal and Frank Heine’s Motion. Hard to get more ’90s than that. The distressed bold sans used for “Presents” is unidentified.

[More info on Discogs]

Text on the booth’s light box sign is set in Persona and a yet unidentified script

On the occasion of the Nitto ATP Finals (12-19 November 2023), Tennis association ATP and digital art platform Artchild partnered to launch a limited edition tennis poster, designed by acclaimed artist Honor Titus.

The poster was available online and on site during the 2023 Nitto ATP Finals. The on-site poster booth was designed by Dum Dum Studio / Christina Rodriguez and was dressed up in posters using a few handfuls of typefaces.

The capitals of the top four lines are a mix of Affigere and at least two more sans serifs. The bottom line is set in Persona and three more yet unidentified typefaces.

The smallest typeface on these posters is Fluxisch Else, a deliberately imperfect version of Univers; “extra” is set in Hypocrite.

The script typefaces on this poster are Ballet and Jane Austen, complemented by ITC American Typewriter Condensed.

“Un Uomo” is in Antique Book Cover, “E Una Racchetta” in Snell Roundhand. The bottom line pairs Serial B with Windsor Elongated.

A combination of ITC Avant Garde Gothic Condensed, Tzigane and Serial D

The newspaper-like masthead uses Leipzig Fraktur Bold. The big text is set in Century Schoolbook. Dalliance Script is used for the date and URL. The smaller texts are set in a combination of ITC Avant Garde Gothic and Airstream NF. The script used for Honor Titus’ name is Snell Roundhand.

Original album cover

Bananaphone is an album by Canadian children’s singer Raffi, released in September 1994.

“Bananaphone” is set in a modified version of Remedy Single. “RAFFI” is set in ITC Kabel Demi. The track listing uses different weights of the aforementioned two fonts, i.e. Remedy Double and ITC Kabel Medium.

On some reissues, “RAFFI” is in Eras Demi instead of ITC Kabel. This only applies to the front cover.

Art direction by Kiki Kambylis, The Design Works, with photography by Colin Goldie, GM Studios.

[More info on Discogs]

For comparison: “Bananaphone” in unmodified Remedy Single. The letter p is a capital P, lowered and rotated. The letter e lost its decorative dots and the smudge on the crossbar.

Track listing

CD label

1995 reissue with the Eras font

Photo: John Butler. License: All Rights Reserved.

Front cover

The late Frank Heine’s Dalliance is rarely chosen as a body text typeface. Jean Derome’s Le Magasin de Tissu features the most extensive printed use of the upright Dalliance I’ve seen that isn’t promotional material for Dalliance itself. The album sounds as crazy as any Jean-Pierre Jeunet film looks, and it carries some interesting typographic context.

Photo: John Butler. License: All Rights Reserved.

CD with type in Dalliance and spine blurb cards in FF Dax

In the mid-1980s, the musician and designer Hans Reichel invented the daxophone, beginning as a piezoelectrically amplified thin strip of wood G-clamped to a table, played with a variety of implements including a cello bow, which in combination with the crucial finely articulated glissandos from its rocking curved wooden “dax,” could eerily and accurately emulate human or animal vocal sounds, beginning with the European badger (der Dachs) after which Reichel named the instrument. He refined the sound body into a portable tripod design, using various woods, from cocobolo to purpleheart to lignum vitae, with which he was already well familiar from his previous unorthodox guitar builds. Reichel toured far and wide playing improvised music on several continents, and he released a number of albums, starting in the 1970s on Berlin’s genre-defining FMP label. At the same time he designed a number of typefaces, beginning with Barmeno for the original Berthold foundry, then later FF Dax, FF Schmalhans, FF Sari and a few others for FontFont. In 2007 Reichel gave a daxophone performance at TYPO Berlin.

Photo: John Butler. License: All Rights Reserved.

CD tray insert with type in Dalliance, Dalliance Script and FF Sari

Meanwhile in early 1980s Quebec, progressive rock guitarist René Lussier and his partners Jean Derome, Robert Marcel Lepage and André Duchesne founded the record label Ambiances Magnetiques, to spread their uniquely Quebecois form of free improvisation music across the globe. They named this style Musique Actuelle. One hesitates to subsume it under the umbrella of “free jazz,” with all of its inaccurate connotations of tiresome American-idiomatic scoobadabeebaboo schmazz. You could just as easily say that about much of the free improvisation sound coming out of the German FMP label at the time, home to Hans Reichel’s recordings—this is also decidedly not schmazz. This music has deeper roots in European folk songs, marches and languages. Indeed Lussier’s own masterwork Le trésor de la langue structures the timing, articulation and pitch of its playing around the cadence of spoken Quebec French recordings.

At some point in or before 1989, Hans Reichel and René Lussier met at or around the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), a more or less annual festival for this sort of music since 1983, and Lussier became sufficiently enamored of the daxophone to get or build one himself. Eventually he performed on his daxophone alongside Reichel on at least two separate occasions, sadly for none of which I can find recordings. After Reichel giving birth to the daxophone in Europe, Lussier has become the most prolific daxophone player in North America, rivaled arguably only by Kazuhisa Uchihashi in the opposite hemisphere. Lussier first featured it on his 1990 album Le Corps de L’Ouvrage. To this day, Lussier features daxophone prominently on most of his new albums.

Not surprisingly, Reichel’s fonts FF Dax and FF Sari started showing up in the label’s album art as well. FF Dax became the default body text font at least for the spines, promo inserts and spine blurbs, on those occasions when it didn’t show up in the album notes themselves.

Photo: John Butler. License: All Rights Reserved.

Table of contents of the three CDs with source recordings.

Photo: John Butler. License: All Rights Reserved.

Overview of the instruments used in the recording.

The whimsical barnyard allure of the daxophone fits perfectly within the Musique Actuelle sound. When it all started, Lussier and Duchesne were the two guitar players on the label, and Derome and Lepage were the two reed players. (All are composers and multi-instrumentalists, of course.) Much of their recorded music began as commissioned accompaniment for dance and theatre pieces.

In the course of making those, Jean Derome accumulated a large suitcase full of various noisemakers, from animal calls to novelty toys to completely unrelated objects that just happen to make silly sounds, which served well as dramatic punctuation in such pieces. Over the years he systematically recorded and catalogued these noisemakers, culminating in this 2001 CD, Le Magasin de Tissu.

Even though Lussier is thanked in the liner notes, there appear to be neither daxophones nor guitars on this CD. All of that detail was context and prelude. The zoo of noisemakers on this CD is entirely Derome’s own.

Photo: John Butler. License: All Rights Reserved.

“Railway timetable” using Dalliance flourishes to locate each instrument’s entrance into the recording

Using some numerological constraints, Derome set up three CDs worth of source recordings and 13-second silence snippets so the exhibition could be played back in a random order, yielding a different output in each performance. The album itself is one of these performances, not to be confused with his private three CDs of source material. The liner notes, designed by Luc Beauchemin, showcase Heine’s font Dalliance, which had been newly released by Emigre at the time. Dalliance’s Script counterpart shows up sparingly in the liner notes, and FF Sari shows up on the back of the CD. Beauchemin makes a point of using lots of Dalliance’s flourishes and alternates, including a few instances of final forms in the middle of words. My favorite detail is his schematic for which noisemakers show up at which points on the CD, like some sort of filigreed railroad timetable. It tells us, for example, that the strange helium babbling beginning sixteen seconds into track 9, opposite the vrrp-vrrp-vrrping firetruck whistle, is something Derome himself must have named the tâwkeux-insidieux, which is sadly ungooglable. We’re left with only a tiny picture of something resembling some kind of animal call. I would love to meet such an animal.

Derome and Lussier have collaborated extensively, and they have a series of duet albums under the group name Les Granules. They’re magnificently goofy.

Compared to Reichel, Lussier and Derome, I’m far less familiar with Dalliance’s designer Frank Heine, other than the fact that like Reichel, he died before his time. Like many designers in the 1990s, Heine began in what became slurred as the “postmodern” or “grunge” type genres, but his final types like Dalliance and Tribute stand up well and are genuine treasures. Dalliance masters the same tension between structure and silliness as Derome’s music, and could not be a more perfect body text choice for the liner notes. Luc Beauchemin must have fallen in love with Dalliance the moment he saw it, which could be the only reason he so meticulously used as many of its alternates, ornaments and features as he could manage to fit into the project. The upright Dalliance, which was a more fanciful outgrowth of the original Dalliance Script based on a historical model, also happens to mesh well with the whole upright French script idiom which lends itself well to the hyperfrancophony of Quebec.

Hunt down and own this CD. Aside from being Worth Owning For The Type Alone, it’s also one excellent musical gateway from type design into the delirious world of musical free improvisation. This record was released on CD only, as far as I can tell, but I hope one day it might be reissued in vinyl format to better show off both its sound and its look.

Photo: John Butler. License: All Rights Reserved.

Liner notes detail in Dalliance

Bumper sticker design from ca. 1993 for the public radio station 88.7 WBFO in Buffalo, NY, a service of the State University of New York at Buffalo (or just University at Buffalo).

Both “NPR NEWS” and “88.7 FM” are set in a slightly horizontally-stretched Pritchard, designed in 1990 by Martin Wait for Letraset. “& jAzZ” is set in Remedy Double, designed in 1991 by Frank Heine for Emigre; the A used is a stylistic alternate. The WBFO logotype is set in tightly-spaced Bernhard Modern Bold, designed in 1937 by Lucian Bernhard for ATF; the crossbar of F is truncated to better accommodate O.

On the one hand, there are a lot of dictionaries in France; on the other hand, there are many books that collect “children’s language”. The aim of our project is to (re)combine these two genres, a priori contradictory, to marry and make a real dictionary, not for kids, but by kids.

Jérôme Duhamel’s Le dico fou des écoliers (“the crazy dictionary for pupils”) was published by Albin Michel in 2004. The cover pairs Futura Condensed with the frivolous Remedy, designed by Frank Heine and released by Emigre in 1991. Remedy was one of the first digital typefaces in a style that had been popular in hand lettering for a while already. See for instance album covers for Living Colour, The Cure and Prince with a lettering that seems to celebrate liberty by choosing a different ‘hand’ or approach for every other glyph.

Atelier Dyakova describes this project:

Creamier brings together 100 of the most exciting contemporary artists emerging today, each chosen by prominent international curator. Original resource, Creamier truly reflects the current moment and is vital for both those in the art world and those that are new to contemporary art.

The book had to be radically different from its four predecessors. A tough design problem — the content is still the same: 10 international curators choose 10 contemporary artists...but how to make it look different?

The frustration to find an original solution has propelled me to abandon traditional book format and transform Creamier into a large format newspaper. The idea is quite simple — announcing 100 new artists is a bit like making news. Inspired by the Financial Times, 300 pink unbound pages come packaged in bespoke portfolio.

The book's design showcases beautifully Frank Heine's Tribute (Emigre) by giving it central stage. The overall heavier weight of the strokes, and relatively low-contrast for a serif typeface, creates a feeling of contemporary and classical at the same time. There are just enough quirky details in it to suggest whimsy making it a good fit for a book on contemporary art. The face has a great italic with many alternates that this design takes advantage of. Tribute is also paired well with the sturdy Bold weight of Neuzeit S.

Cover and interior pages of this new adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, published by Sesi-SP and designed by São Paulo-based graphic designer Tereza Bettinardi.

The title of the book is written out mixing different characters of Gandur Alte and Gandur New by Brazilian type designer Daniel Sabino from Blacklettera. The name of the author is set in Futura and is aligned with the main title’s extended ‘t’.

The interior is set in Tribute by Emigre, using Gandur for drop caps.

From Kristen Fossum:

This package design affirms the Mistral Soap Company’s commitment to the Earth through the use of sustainable packaging methods. The concept of the design is the transforming winds of France's Mistral, whose pattern is reflected in the letter ‘m’ within the ligatures of the Dalliance typeface. Two labels, printed on Greenfield Paper Company Hemp Heritage 24# bond weight paper (tree-free and 100% recycled), were created and adhered to the front and back of each package – a 100% biodegradable and compostable tin-tie bag made from 40% recycled natural kraft fiber (25% post-consumer) and lined with PLA (polylactide), a biodegradable thermoplastic film derived from renewable resources like cornstarch or sugarcane. Type is set in Dalliance and Hoefler Text.
Three bags at 4.25 × 2.5 × 10.5 inches each.

A compendium of work in typeface design and graphic design by Frank Heine (1964-2003).

The small line of russet-colored sans is, I think, an unpublished typeface called Jakob.