Poster (40″×60″)

The poster for Alan J. Pakula's 1974 film The Parallax View uses Electus for the film title and Warren Beatty's top billing, while Helvetica Medium is used for the tagline and the Medium and Bold weights of Folio Condensed are used for the credits.

From Wikipedia:

The Parallax View is a 1974 American political thriller film starring Warren Beatty, with Hume Cronyn, William Daniels and Paula Prentiss in support. Produced and directed by Alan J. Pakula, its screenplay is by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr., based on the 1970 novel by Loren Singer.The story concerns a reporter’s investigation into a secretive organization, the Parallax Corporation, whose business is political assassination.

One Sheet (27″×41″)

Print ad by American Image Corp. from 1973, featuring Electus for the headline.

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Electus is Photo-Lettering’s commercial adaptation of the custom Electric Circus by Chermayeff & Geismar.

The third album from New Orleans funk quartet The Meters features this distinctive cover, with the artwork echoing the reflective quality of Electus. This typeface by Photo-Lettering is an adaptation of Electric Circus, a custom alphabet by Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar. PLINC’s version is distinguished by a few details, most notably an R with diagonal leg.

The logo of Josie – a subsidiary of Jubilee Records that was active from 1954 to 1971 – is in Montgomery Pousse Cafe. Track names and credits are set in Memphis.

[More info at Discogs]

“The cover art was from a Mick Rock photograph that fortuitously went out of focus as he was printing it in the darkroom. Rock noticed the flaw but decided he liked the effect, so he submitted the image for the album cover.” — Wikipedia

The type is purposefully out of focus, too. It’s possible these stuttering letters were custom made for the album, but the repeating ‘E’ and ‘R’ match and I feel pretty certain I’ve seen the typeface before. Maybe I’m thinking of Double Vision (or whatever earlier design inspired it), which isn’t quite it. In any event, the letterforms are way ahead of their time. Very similar ideas were explored more than 20 years later in the digital grunge era.

Art direction and design by Ernst Thormahlen who was responsible for many album covers in the 1970s.

Update: Thanks to a find by Folker Gorter, I think we can identify this typeface as Electus. Chermayeff & Geismar’s advertising for The Electric Circus used a very similar typeface (though with a few differences including an ‘R’ with a vertical leg). The use of the style for Transformer is perhaps a tribute to that groundbreaking nightclub which closed in 1971, the year before this album was released.