Bordering on LTypI: Platelet for The Planets. Its designer, Conor Mangat, comments on the genesis of his debut typeface:

Platelet grew out of a 4-day workshop given to students—most with no type design experience—at CalArts in October 1992. The brief, from Phil Baines, asked for an original alphabet to be designed for a specific outdoor purpose, taking into consideration the context for usage, appropriateness and meaning, and traditional notions of good typography.

Consequently, Platelet is based directly on characters and figures found on the car license plates in California. Its original character set comprised only a single lowercase alphabet and non-lining figures, ostensibly to complement the existing all-caps characters on the plates. For its commercial release, however, the set was extended to include alternate, small capitals and other commonly used text characters – somewhat ironic considering the original brief had principally been to create specific display faces that weren’t just scaled text faces.

Cover designer Paul Marc Mitchell took advantage of the added small caps, and mixed them with the lowercase forms.

This album with the Berliner Philharmoniker’s rendition of The Planets under Simon Rattle (b. 1955) was first released as a double CD in 2006. Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite is complemented by four additional tracks by contemporary composers – thanks to Colin Matthews, Pluto finally gets acknowledged, too (just to lose its status as a proper planet the same year) – plus a video by Paul Bates.

[More info on Discogs]

Warner Classics released a vinyl version with just the original suite and Matthews’ addition in 2025.

Järjekord. Üks episood Tartu fotoloost / The Queue. An Episode in Tartu’s Photo History is an exhibition about an exhibition. The bilingual catalog (Estonian and English) with texts by Indrek Grigor, Adam Mazur, and Alise Tifentale was co-edited and designed by Alexey Murashko. It was published by Tartu Kunstimuuseum in 2023.

From art critic and co-author Indrek Grigor:

This book, which offers a glimpse into the photography of the 1980s in the Soviet Union, includes documents about the history of the exhibitions, a selection of works by Estonian photographers who participated in the Soviet Union-wide exhibition contest “Women in Photographic Art,” and a brief insight into the role of nudity in the Estonian media of the 1980s. The latter draws from the miraculously preserved archive of the “Edasi” newspaper’s “Summer Woman” photo contest.

The archival material compiled in the book is complemented by Indrek Grigor’s overview of the “Woma [sic!] in Photographic Art” exhibition series’ history, an article by Latvian photo historian Alise Tifentale that focuses on the 1977 exhibition of women photographers in Riga titled Women with Cameras, and an essay by Polish art historian Adam Mazur, which discusses the legendary exhibition series Venus in Krakow, which also inspired the Tartu exhibition.

On March 3, 1983, the Tartu Photography Club opened in Tartu Art House the first exhibition in the series Women in Photographic Art. It quickly became one of the most popular events in the history of exhibitions in Tartu, with a total of five episodes. Women in Photographic Art reached its peak popularity in 1989 when it was visited by 24,000 people over four weeks. The stories of the queues outside the Tartu Art House are the initial impetus for this book and the preceding exhibition.

Erotica was frowned upon in the public sphere of the Soviet Union, and organizing an exhibition featuring nudes required some political manoeuvring. In response to this, the political sentiment during the period of re-independence included a somewhat carnival-like opposition to the Soviet Union, including its puritanism. With the growth of media freedom, such as the publication of the Maaja magazine in 1989 and featuring nudity on the front page of the Edasi newspaper, the exhibition Woman in Photographic Art lost its value as a rarity, and it waned in the machinery of capitalism of the 1990s.

The approach to the design of the book could be described as a retrospective speculation on Estonian visual aesthetics of the late Soviet era combining both affective and decadent modernist type with noticeable traces of the broad nib pen, very present in Estonian graphic design during the second half of the 20th century, and the rationality and at the same time poor naïveté of the geometric modular faces of the late 1980s. It is very peculiar how two typefaces (Tercia and Platelet) created in absolutely different cultural and geographical contexts could complement each other and the graphical composition of the cover so well.

The book interior features two more families used for body setting and captions (Atlas Grotesk), and for marginalia and running headers (Arnold), both supporting the Cyrillic script occasionally appearing in the publication along with the main text in Estonian and English. All four corners of the book were rounded matching the features of the Platelet and the cover’s pattern.

Boomker Boeken is a book shop in Haren, the Netherlands. It was founded in 1918 and was family-owned until 2006.

This logotype was in use until 2023.

“1979” was released in 1996 as the second single from the Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Accompanied by an award-winning video, it became the band’s highest-charting single.

The artwork stands in stark contrast to the retro design of the album, with its elaborate romantic collages and the Victorian typeface. The look of “1979” is very much contemporary, i.e. 1990s. Paul Elledge’s cover photo shows the band members on rollerskates, posing in front of the neon sign of a “game room / party room” – apparently a reference to the front and back covers of Linda Ronstadt’s Living In The U.S.A. The photography uses a combination of long-exposure plus flash, resulting in an aesthetic that is reminiscent of the spontaneousness and embraced imperfection of lomography. The extrawide techno typeface is Mata. The only published typeface design by Greg Samata was released with T-26 in 1995.

Both the Mellon Collie album art and the “1979” single were designed by Frank Olinsky. When Olinsky asked band leader Billy Corgan why he had chosen him, “he said he owned quite a few CDs that I had art directed/designed and he liked that I didn’t have one style that I imposed on all my projects. Rather, he felt that each was a good design that fit the particular recording.” [2009 interview] These releases are a case in point.

[More info on Discogs]

Jewel case with front cover.

Jewel case with back cover. The track numbers and the credits are set in a quintessential 1990s typeface, Conor Mangat’s Platelet (Emigre, 1993).

Open jewel case with compact disc.

Promo poster, pairing Mata with Futura.

Compact cassette (side A) with front cover.

Compact cassette (side B) with back cover. Mata is paired with Platelet.

Front cover of the vinyl release of the “1979” mixes, featuring a globe (or disco ball) with the SP heart logo.

Back cover of the vinyl release of the “1979” mixes.

1972 edition with Kabel Black as secondary typeface.

Sorry! is a popular board game in which players try to travel around the board with their pieces (called pawns) faster than any other player. The game was first published in 1929 in England by W.H. Storey & Company and in later years was introduced to America by Parker Brothers. Today it is wholly owned and distributed by Hasbro.

Since 1972, its logo typeface is Advertisers Gothic. It’s bold and brash, like the city it comes from, Chicago. Advertisers Gothic was designed by the accomplished German-American matrix engraver, Robert Wiebking, for the Western Type Foundry in 1917.

Find more information about Sorry! on Board Game Geek.

1972 edition.

1992 edition with Lithos as secondary typeface. See also TV ads from 1993 and 1996.

2005 edition. “The Game of Sweet Revenge” uses Platelet. “Plan a Family Game Night” is set in Marydale.

2020 edition. The secondary typeface is Avenir.

2021 edition.

The Simpsons edition, 2007. Secondary typefaces include Filmotype Maxwell [or rather the digitization Will Robinson, see comments] and Futura Extra Bold Condensed.

Madagascar edition, 2005. The film logo is probably custom, “Edition” is in Estro.

The sign is based on two weights of Platelet, a 1993 typeface by Conor Mangat that is available from Emigre.

Three letters in each word (a, s, a and o, i, e) are taken from Platelet Thin. The outlined letters (c and c, s) are taken from Platelet Heavy. One minor modification was made to one of the thin letters: The tittle of i was moved closer to the stem, presumably in order to make better use of the limited vertical space.

Menu card for a 60th birthday dinner designed by Pierrick Boffy at his graphic studio Anagraph.