CD release

This is the album cover for Siyah Işıklar (“Black Lights”), the fourth studio album by Turkish pop music artist, composer, and lyricist Kayahan (1949–2015), released in 1989. The album features Kayahan performing new songs as well as tracks previously covered by other artists. It was popular upon its release. It was released on CD and cassette, with the cover being essentially the same for both, featuring Van Dijk for the title. When the album was reissued on vinyl in 2015, ITC Quorum was replaced by Friz Quadrata.

[More info on Discogs]

MC release

Vinyl release

The self-titled debut album from April 1978 was designed by Zoran Busic with art by Rene Zamic.

Record collector, DJ and musicologist Klaus Hiltscher on Saga’s debut album:

In Germany the most sold Saga LP. I like this one because you hear also some rock guitars. In later LPs was the keyboards very dominant! “Humble Stance” is a very significant song for Saga, like “Satisfaction” for the Stones. To me it was the last LP which I really heard. In that year we opened our record shop ROCK ON, from then on I mostly heard Punk/Metal or New Wave like Gary Numan.

The cover established Solemnis as the typeface closely associated with the Canadian band’s early years. For the follow-up, Images at Twilight, the festive uncial by Günter Gerhard Lange was also used for the album title.

The track list on the back is set in Friz Quadrata, mostly in all caps.

The cover for Images at Twilight from May 1979 was again designed by Busic, this time with art by Tony Roberts.

Tracklist and credits on the back are set in Trump-Mediäval Italic.

Silent Knight was released in November 1980. Busic collaborated with Roberts another time. Solemnis made way for Parsons.

No More Jinx (Chrysalis Records, 1986) [More info on Discogs]

From Billboard magazine (June 28, 1986, p. 18):

Chicago-based band Wild Blue is playing Midwest dates through July supporting its Chrysalis debut album, “No More Jinx.” The album’s first single, “Fire With Fire,” is also the theme song for the Paramount Pictures' movie of the same name.

From Billboard magazine (July 19, 1986, p. N-5)

Noting that Chrysalis spent the first half of of 1986 developing bands like Icehouse, the Art of Noise, and Wild Blue, [Fran] Musso says, “It might take longer to break new acts, but I think labels are still definitely open to getting new talent across.”

Unfortunately for Wild Blue, their brush with a national audience did not last much beyond 1986. However, this brief foray with major label exposure did provide us with examples of Photoscript’s France in use as their band logo.

Art direction and design for the No More Jinx album is credited to Ria Lewerke. No design credits are given on the “Fire With Fire” single.

Close-up of band logo from their album's record sleeve.

“Fire With Fire” single. (Chrysalis Records, 1986) [More info on Discogs] The other fonts present beside France, from top to bottom, are Friz Quadrata, Eras, and Futura.

All-caps Friz Quadrata Bold for Heartwork, the fourth studio album by English extreme metal band Carcass. The sculpture depicted in the cover art, Life Support 1993, was designed by H.R. Giger, and is an update of a sculpture he created in the late 1960s.

[More info on Discogs]

From Wikipedia:

The Rarities is the seventh compilation album by American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey, released on October 2, 2020, by Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings. The album coincided with Carey's 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey, which discussed various songs on the albums, their meanings and stories. The album was released as a part of “#MC30”, a promotional marking campaign which marked the 30th anniversary of Carey’s self-titled debut album.

Cover photography by Naomi Kaltman. The typography in all-caps Friz Quadrata is uncredited.

[More info on Discogs]

Ticket stubs for the Super Bowl VIII which was played on January 13, 1974, at Houston’s Rice Stadium and ended in a 24–7 win for the Miami Dolphins over the Minnesota Vikings.

“Super Bowl VIII” is shown in linked letters from Yagi Bold. Even the Roman numerals were connected. The name of the location is set in contoured caps from Friz Quadrata, integrated into the illustration by Peter Palombi. Information at the bottom is in Helvetica. The seat info at the top appears to use News Gothic and Alternate Gothic. The flag in 1 is a little different – maybe it’s a version for special numbering machines.

TT Fors is used on the CRUSH Collection website. The logo is based on Friz Quadrata.

CRUSH Collection is an international knitted and crocheted clothing brand that has delighted customers with warm and sophisticated Old Money style clothing for many years.

Entry sign to the city of Melitopol (Мелітополь), made in Friz Quadrata Bold, with Cyrillic letters. Paratype does offer a Cyrillic version of this typeface, but theirs has different forms for Л and Ь than what’s featured in the sign.

The photo was taken on 18 May 2018. In addition to cherries and cogwheels (for mechanical engineering), the symbols on the right depict honeycombs – Melitopol literally is the “city of honey”.

The Deluxe version of the Memory Man delay pedal from Electro-Harmonix debuted around 1977. As of 2024, It’s still (or again) in production, with a basically unchanged design.

The pedal name is set in VGC’s Barry and a bold condensed sans, possibly Kabel Black with straightened terminals. Labels are in Helvetica and sometimes also in Futura. The Electro-Harmonix logo is set in Skjald, see the dedicated post.

A blue-and-red version of the Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man from around 1977

This magazine ad from 1977 for the (non-deluxe) Memory Man is set in Baker Signet (or Baker Signete by Headliners, which offered additional weights) with Friz Quadrata.

The Nano Deluxe Memory Man is a compact version of the classic Deluxe Memory Man.

Dr Pepper is a carbonated soft drink created by pharmacist Charles Alderton in Waco, Texas, and first served around 1885. Dr Pepper was first nationally marketed in the United States in 1904.

According to an article on 1000logos.net, the shown logo was in use from 1997 to 2005. It is based on the Bold weight of Friz Quadrata, slanted and set on a sloping baseline. The gaps in the p’s were closed, the P enlarged and its bowl decreased in height, to accomodate the e beneath. ITC had added true italic styles to the typeface family in 1994, including a Bold Italic, but these are distinguished by cursive characteristics like a round e.

The Dr Pepper logo (left) compared to a resetting in Friz Quadrata Bold (Bitstream’s digitization), slanted by 23 degrees, with letterforms stretched to 103% of their width and tightened spacing, and a scaled up initial P (with unadjusted bowl).

In 2014, this soft drink machine in Wellston, Ohio, still featured the logo based on Friz Quadrata.

The Dr. Pepper affiliate in the UK continues to use this logo to the date of writing.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Back in the spring of 2016 Kaisa and I had a brilliant idea.

Well, actually we had two brilliant ideas. They were 1. To ride our bikes across North America, from East to West, and 2. To raise money for the trip by making and selling a punk zine about bike travel.

”But why a punk zine of all things? There can’t be much money in that”, you might exclaim. And you would be absolutely right. But doing things that are rational has rarely been a guiding principle for the two of us. So yes, a punk zine it was to be.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

At this point I had also grown somewhat tired of the meticulous perfectionism that came with desktop publishing. There was a small part of the otherwise so very pedantic me that viewed such an ability to fully control the visual environment as both sterile and impersonal. And while I know this isn’t a very original observation to make I still longed for the more tactile ways of designing.

This project offered me the ideal opportunity to make use of all the old type catalogues and printed ephemera I had amassed during decades of unorganized and mostly stochastic collecting and turn them into something new. In the process I also ended up spending a hundred euros on an old Xerox machine our school was going to ditch anyway, and to the dismay of my brother placing it in his garage.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

I began by whipping out my old Letraset catalogue and starting to blow up the typefaces I thought I could use in the project. Turns out this included almost all of the typefaces presented. As for the Letraset catalogue, this was the very book that incidentally ignited my love for typography when I first came across it in 1986. I simply couldn’t believe that so many wonderful letterforms existed in this world. An insight I still cling onto some three decades later.

In making the zine I set up a couple of rules for myself: 1. All type (with the exception of the body copy) would be set by hand, meaning it would be cut and pasted, and 2. The tools used would be analogue (with the exception of a concession I made enabling me to use digital cameras when needed), 3. No rulers or other measuring devices would be allowed, everything had to be eyeballed, 4. Fonts would be used to one’s heart’s content and combined without too much thought or prejudice, and finally 5. Everything would be in black and white, because, well, punk is black and white!

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

With these simple guidelines I sat down and began designing, allowing the process and the mistakes I made along the way guide me towards some form of an end result. The fun part was that for once I had no clear picture in my mind of what was to happen. Working in this way was intuitive and liberating, but even more importantly helped me realize how much of the transparency we associate with computer-generated design is illusory. The tool always controls its user whether they are aware of it or not. And if that’s not a punk rock insight then I don’t know what would be!

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

While working on the zine we realized that the project wasn’t as difficult or time-consuming as we had thought, so we decided to up our game: There would be a tape to go along with the zine! The problem was neither of us played any instruments or sang. (You’d be hard pressed to find a more musically challenged person than myself!)

So we wrote a ton of letters to bands that we thought would be cool to work with, and to our great joy almost all of them responded with enthusiasm and a promise to participate. This was turning out to be way easier than we would have anticipated!

The full tape can still be listened to over on the otherwise slightly less well-functioning project site, should you feel the need to hear some phenomenal Finnish punk and hardcore.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Next question to sort out was who on Earth would still produce tapes in 2016? Well, through some obscure connections we got in touch with a lay Christian preacher who had a small tape production facility set up in his basement in the suburbs of East Helsinki. He would mainly record his own sermons, but he also occasionally sold his services to outsiders. And we were definitely as outsiders as it gets!

And while we’re coming up with new stuff, why not include a poster? And some envelopes to keep all the things together! And some stationery, should we want to write someone. Once again our initially somewhat reasonable project began, somewhat unsurprisingly, to snowball.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

But all of a sudden it was all done! We printed up some 300 copies of both the zine and the tape, and I don’t think we’ve ever sold out anything we produced as quickly. Yay! Unfortunately our goal to collect funds for our trip was a a non-starter as the production costs far exceeded what we had hoped for.

So realistically we probably ended up losing more money than we made on this venture. But even this is not certain, as we really didn’t keep track of our finances. Still, the whole project should still be considered a grand success, because we had a ton of fun doing it!

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Gaucho is the seventh studio album by the American rock band Steely Dan, released by MCA Records on November 21, 1980.

The cover was art directed and designed by Susanne Walsh, with assistance from John Tom Cohoe. It is based upon a low relief sculpture by Argentine artist Israel Hoffmann, see below.

The band name is set in lowercase letters from ITC Avant Garde Gothic’s X-Light, with tight letterspacing. In ITC’s digital version, the bottom of s was made narrower and the n wider. One digitization that follows the original more closely is Avalon. The album title is added in Friz Quadrata Bold.

[More info on Discogs]

A photo of the Gaucho artwork inspiration, Israel Hoffman’s wall art Guardia Vieja Tango, located in La Boca, a neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

As featured in the Type Directors Club’s 1981 annual, Typography 2, this logo for a UK dyslexia association references the common misconception that dyslexia involves flipping letters.

Most people believe that the defining feature of dyslexia is “mirror writing” or “mirror reading” (Fiorello, 2001; Gorman, 2003). Indeed, many laypersons believe that dyslexics literally see letters backward. Two types of reversals are commonly associated in the public mind with dyslexia: (1) reversing letters themselves, like writing or seeing “b” instead of “d,” and (2) reversing the order of letters within words, like writing “tar” instead of “rat.” … there’s no evidence that dyslexics literally “see” letters backward or in reverse order within words.

— 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior

Although they do occur, reversal of letters or words, or mirror writing, is not included in the definition of dyslexia.

— “Learning disabilities, dyslexia, and vision”. Pediatrics. 127 (3): e818–56

Despite that unfortunate misrepresentation (perhaps much more prevalent in the 1980s), the mark is rather well executed by the prolific letterer Tony Forster. He started with Letraset transfer type (according to the credits), mirroring the s and e, modifying the y x a, and connecting the ys. His use of ITC Avant Garde Gothic ligatures is adept as well.

As my wife and I prepared for a yard sale, she invited me to make some signs to post around the neighborhood. Along with the For Sale sign, the Yard Sale sign typically finds itself executed in neon-orange Helvetica on black or with marker on construction paper approach. While a markered sign may offer a humanistic style, it often lacks legibility and distinctiveness — essential qualities as I had some excellent albums and DVDs to sell.

Compositionally, these posters are set minimally where the same cut of type operates in three sizes. Type size and letter spacing define the three typestyles, each being one-third smaller than the other. The headlines are defined by four-letter words that rag well when centered. The subheads were written as twelve-character lines that could justify hard to contrast the ragged edge.

Friz Quadrata was chosen for its balance of surgical precision and hand-crafted appearance. The historical usages of Friz Quadrata in Black Flag’s logo, the titling of Scarface, and Law and Order were references I enjoyed and felt my ideal yard sale customer might unconsciously be attracted to. After all, I was selling crime drama DVDs and punk albums.

Several characters of Friz Quadrata were redrawn with multiple variations to align closer to hand lettering. Several characters were redrawn entirely for optimal horizontal, vertical, and diagonal relationships.

Friz Quadrata is a popular choice for film titles: ten years after it featured as supporting typeface in The Exorcist and two years after appearing in the end titles of the first Indiana Jones movie, the majestic roman by Ernst Friz made it to the lead in 1983. Used exclusively in red caps, center-aligned, Friz Quadrata introduces Scarface, the crime drama film directed by Brian De Palma and written by Oliver Stone.

From Wikipedia:

Loosely based on the 1929 novel of the same name and serving as a loose remake of the 1932 film, it tells the story of Cuban refugee Tony Montana (Al Pacino), who arrives penniless in Miami during the Mariel boatlift and becomes a powerful drug lord. The film co-stars Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Robert Loggia. De Palma dedicated this version of Scarface to the memories of Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, the writers of the original film.

IMDb credits the title sequence design to David H. Dreyfuss.

In 1990, Friz Quadrata would become the typographic call sign of Law & Order.

Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Joe Clark and tagged with “frizquadrata”. License: All Rights Reserved.

From Scarface to Multi-Surface, from Law & Order to spick & span: Friz Quadrata is the typeface used for Hope’s Perfect cleaning products. It appears for the names on the bottles of the various specialized products. Whether it happened in the kitchen or on granite, Hope’s will render any crime scene stainless again.

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

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

Source: hopecompany.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: hopecompany.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: hopecompany.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: hopecompany.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: hopecompany.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Friz Quadrata is also used for the logo, in stretched caps from the Bold weight.

From Wikipedia:

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1981 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Lawrence Kasdan, based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. Set in 1936, the film stars Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, a globetrotting archaeologist vying with Nazi German forces to recover the long-lost Ark of the Covenant which is said to make an army invincible. Teaming up with his tough former romantic interest Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Jones races to stop rival archaeologist Dr. René Belloq (Paul Freeman) from guiding the Nazis to the Ark and its power.

The opening credits pair Open Kapitalen with Eurostile. Eurostile Extended is used for "of the Lost Ark" and "South America, 1936," whereas other credits use the Regular, optically stetched to around 150% its original width to give the impression of the Extended. The map, seen during location transitions, features Legende (with alternates) and ITC Serif Gothic, with both set in all caps. The end credits are set in Friz Quadrata.

Titles by MGM Title Department, credited as MGM Titles.

See also the title sequences for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Te Amo Lá Fora front cover with photography by Fernando Tomaz

Duda Beat’s second studio album Te Amo Lá Fora was released in 2021, mixing pop music with Brazilian beats. The project had the creative direction of Marcelo Jarosz, who is known for exploring different textures and surreal elements in his work.

The vinyl edition was released by Noize Records in 2022.

[More info on Discogs]

Te Amo Lá Fora back cover

Gatefold (open) with lyrics

Introducing the latest Fall/Winter Collection for Goodbois, which prioritizes sleek apparel designs over flashy typography and prints.

The standout piece is a graphic dachshund emblazoned with a beautiful quote in the elegant Caxton Italic font. The woven labels on the sleeves and front of the headwear feature the original logo paired with the timeless Friz Quadrata, complemented by a laurel wreath. Experience the perfect blend of style and sophistication with Goodbois’ new collection.

Goobois once again puts the word “GOOD” in Alaca on the front of the hoodies and sweaters, as it has done before. Get a closer look on the Goodbois website.

Navigating the sea of spirits, Southwest Distillery orients itself with its own compass. With courage, it differs from the old ideas, even so, it is traditional in its own way. Headquartered in São Roque, in the interior of São Paulo and surrounded by the Atlantic forest, the distillery's mission is to care for the local fauna and flora, which is why it helps injured animals in the region, through institutions.

The company's history begins on a remote island in the United Kingdom and finds its way to Brazil, by its master distiller, part of a lineage of navigators, apothecary and lovers of a good drink. To launch the first two Southwest gins, an exclusive bottle design, labels and boxes were made that evoke this legacy with elegance and instigate consumers and nature lovers to taste.

The logo was designed with Captain Nelson. It is a serif typeface with several distressed options, which allowed us to customize it to refer to that traditional look of British sailors while maintaining a contemporary look. From it, a monogram was customized; on its counter-shape there is the drop that represents the act of distillation.

Engravers Gothic complements the logo for the endorsement and very punctual texts on the packaging. Friz Quadrata contrasts Captain Nelson’s weight in identity with her historical but functional air in long texts.

The family tree of the British master distiller Alex Rudd led the project’s research to the origin of his ancestors, in a remote archipelago, the Shetland Islands. In the southwest of the island is located: Sumburgh Head, the first lighthouse in the region. The magnificence of this monument, its importance for the navigators of the time and the pattern of its stained glass window, were inspirations for the shape of the bottle and the lozenge weave around it, with the addition of brand elements such as a monogram, a drop and the geographical coordinates of the lighthouse. The distillery’s identity explores graphics and perforations that refer to old travel stamps, as well as engravings of botanists and anthropomorphic animals from the region in a Victorian cocktail context. This is manifested in the discreet labels, by the presence of illustrations and a special knife.

The achieved packaging solution differs from national competitors that normally use common bottles. The detail at the bottom of the bottle encourages consumers to understand the history of the product and its striking texture transforms the packaging into an object of decorative desire even after consumption. The labels on textured paper, with a guarantee of ecological origin, have botanical details, a sensorial profile, high relief and elegant golden finishes. Regional animals preparing drinks, present in the bottle, reinforce the purpose of animal protection linked to the drink. In addition, the graphic elements and colors alternate to sectorize the styles of gin, bringing a result that presents the positioning with the desired refinement to reach the most refined public.