The Lonesome Valley Singers were a Canadian country and western band from Victoria, British Columbia. In 1965, Diplomat Records released an album with a Vietnam War theme.

The cover typography brings together three typefaces from the Filmotype library, including two originals, all used in all caps. Vermont is an open and shaded variant of Wagner. The top halves of the letters in “WAR SONGS” were manually filled in red, creating an effect that resembles chromatic wood type. Windsor is a bold condensed gothic with tiny serifs. The song names are set in Futura Display, which was carried by Filmotype as “FD”.

[More info on Discogs]

The title sequence used in Gaspar Noé’s Cannes-selected movie Enter the Void has amazed me over the years in terms of typography and graphic design, and thanks to a friend of mine, Puz, (some of) these fonts have been identified.

It was created by Tom Kan, a Japanese designer based in Paris. From Ian Albinson’s interview with Kan for Art of the Title:

The sequence is a typographer’s wet dream (or alternatively their nightmare). How were the various fonts and characters chosen?

The choice of typefaces came rather naturally. After coming up with a large selection in line with the film’s mood, we simply chose the ones that best suited the characters and the personalities of those in the team. Gaspar wanted each title to reflect the person it concerned. It was a beautiful homage and proof of his respect for the members of the team — a way to thank them.

Many typefaces and designs did not get used because the time limit was set — the sound mix was already done and it was impossible to extend. I think we used only 60% of the designs, all in all.

Every typeface used in the sequence seems to be a reference to other famous film title or poster fonts. What was the typeface you selected for your own credit and why?

We appropriated different typefaces, but we never wanted to copy the titles from other films in an obvious way since I thought that would be misleading. For my own credit, I went in many different directions: aged typefaces in metal, Kanji and Japanese calligraphy, techno typography… In the end, I let Gaspar choose and he went with the biggest, most legible type!

Watch the title sequence on YouTube, or right below (epilepsy/flashing lights warning):

Futura Extra Bold Condensed in all caps is the primary typeface for the credits. Here it’s used in combination with Kozuka Gothic for Japanese, alongside some logos.

Music credits include Egyptienne Medium Condensed, Garamond, Eurostile, Bodoni Condensed, Neue Helvetica 93, Futura, and Helvetica Condensed. It’s unclear if the LFO logo uses a font (Disco Deck is similar) or whether it’s custom drawn.

In addition to Futura Extra Bold Condensed, the logos of the production and distribution companies feature Euphoric (Wild Bunch) and Futura Extra Bold (Fidelité).

Producer credits feature FB Agency, Kozuka Gothic, ITC Machine, Futura Display, stretched and slanted Woodblock, and Antique Olive Nord

The names of the co-producers are set in Egyptienne Medium Condensed, Univers Ultra Condensed, Futura, an unidentified font similar to Crown Title, two unidentified stencil(ed) fonts, and Trajan.

More Egyptienne Medium Condensed for Suzanne Girard

Manager credits feature Haettenschweiler, Council, Neue Helvetica Extended (?), Clarendon, Pump Triline, Fiorello, Eurostile, Thorowgood Sans Shaded, and Futura Condensed.

The name of location manager Masahiro Hondo in Glaser Stencil serves as a mask.

Bank Gothic with rainbow glow effect for Lucio Tomaro

Photography credits with slanted Bank Gothic (Benoît Debie), bold italic City with added and extended top and baseline serifs (Gaspar Noé), TFAvian (Akira Kanno), outlined Futura (Yasushi Miyata), Bell Gothic (Jacques Bernier), and Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed (Yves Le Peillet)

Art credits featuring an unidentified blocky unicase face with 3D bevel effect similar to Mark (Marc Caro), FF Vortex (Kikuo Ohta), another unidentified blocky sans (Jean Carrière), and Zeppelin (Nicoletta Massone)

The dripping letters for Tony Crosbie appear to be custom(ized) – Shlop is a similar ready-made font.

Sound and editor credits with Eurostile (Ken Yasumoto), stretched Ironwood (Ryotaro Harada), contoured Nasalization (Claude Lahaye), an upright LCD typeface, probably Digital (Thomas Bangalter), a heavily modified Sonic or another font inspired by the Star Trek TNG logo (Lars Ginzel), Galledis with hyperextended lines (Gaspar Noé), modified SF Archery Black (Marc Boucrot), Zaius, a typeface family emulating the Planet of the Apes movie series logo (Jerome Pesnel), and ITC Machine (Pierre Buffin).

The fonts used for these cards include an unidentified inline face similar to Rubaiyat and Gothicum (Geoffroy Niquet), SF Archery Black (Yann de Cadoudal), OCR-A (Nicolas Delval), Mexcellent (Xavier Allard), fractured caps from a bold sans, possibly Compacta Black (Julien Aullas), Synchro (Bastien Laurent), Helvetica Rounded Bold Condensed (Anne-Sophie Bertrand), and an unidentified squarish sans similar to SB Carbon, Resistance Is Lowered or Apollo Rocket (Loris Paillier).

City Bold, slanted, with double contour and extended baseline serifs, for Tom Kan, Director of Typography

Gaspar Noé in outlined caps from Futura Extra Bold Condensed, without accent on the E

The blackletter typeface chosen for Lucile Hadžihalilović is Linotext (or Mariage, Wedding Text) with some modifications: e and c got bottom serifs and the swash in v was moved from the left to the right stem,

Paz de la Huerta gets various typographic treatments, including Eagle (in a weight between Bold and Black), Futura Dot with Citadel Script, outlined Egyptienne Bold Extended, and ITC Neon.

The Japanese transcription of Paz dela Huerta’s name (パス・デ・ラ・ウエルタ) appears to be Hiragino Maru Gothic or similar, with added contour.

Nathaniel Brown’s name is shown in Pump, ITC Bolt, Aachen, West Barnum Block filled with stars and stripes, and ITC Lubalin Graph Demi.

The fonts chosen for Cyril Roy include Aachen, American Text, Monotype Garamond, and at least two Japanese ones.

The MICR-inspired face used for Olly Alexander is handmade, as confirmed byo Tom Kan. Other fonts include Compacta and all-caps ITC Bolt.

The fonts used for Masato Tanno are Akzidenz-Grotesk Stencil and Ainsdale. The others are yet unidentified.

Gothicum and a (custom?) stencil version of Aachen for Ed Spear, Helvetica Rounded and Neue Helvetica 95 for Emily Alyn Lind, more Helvetica Rounded, an unidentified Japanese font, and Eagle for Jesse Kuhn and Nobu Imai

More ITC Neon and Helvetica Rounded for Sakiko Fukuhara. The bitmap font is 04b_08.

Sarah Stockbridge is set in Haettenschweiler with hyper-extended glyphs).

The names of Janice Sicotte-Beliveau and Stuart Miller are shown in Cooper Black, Impact Wide, Monterey and ITC Officina Serif, Braggadocio, Fiedler Gothic, and Blackoak.

Yemi Carol is presented in Impact Wide, Helvetica Rounded, and a Japanese Maru Gothic. The font shown at the bottom right is unidentified.

Several of the fonts used for Gaspar Noé’s name are yet unidentified. This includes alll fonts in the top row and the left one in the second row, which is similar to Moore Computer and Data 70. Other fonts include ITC Lubalin Graph, Futura Extra Bold Condensed, and Eagle.

Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men is a craft book written by Rosey Grier (b. 1932) and published by Walker & Co. in 1973. From the inner flap:

What happens when a tough cookie tackles the finer things in life? Will he leave people in stitches? Must he take a little gentle needling? Not if it’s Rosey Grier, former Los Angeles Rams and New York Giants tackle, who is putting down the pigskin and picking up stitchery. A sissy? Not a hulking, awesome, six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound chance. And if Rose’s massive hands can create lovely designs on canvas, then so can just about anyone’s.

Travis Boyer wrote about the book for Maharam:

Rosey Grier’s revolutionary aims are made clear in “Chapter 13: Other Men in Needlepoint.” Grier is brutally honest, discussing the shaming he received for his needlepoint, including numerous harassing phone calls. Naming and quoting friends and football players, Grier charges them with a kind of tacit homophobia: “cut that crap, Ro, you’ll have everyone who thought football players were rough and tough, looking at us like we are sissies or something else.”

Don’t cry. Rosey has all the answers. In time his shade-throwing football buddies all end up in his ever-growing sewing circle: “Every one of them does needlepoint now.”

Make sure to read the full article, which does a great job of providing the sociocultural context into which the book was published.

For the jacket design, Barbara Huntley worked with Photo-Lettering’s Accelera. The fat rounded caps are shown in blue, with a triple shadow in pink, red, and orange. “Needlepoint” is in caps from Jay H. Schechter’s Jay Gothic.

The title in Accelera and Jay Gothic is repeated on the inner flap, with text in Times New Roman.

The title page combines – the problematically named – Jim Crow with Futura Display.

Invitation to the book launch, with Franklin Gothic and Accelera D, that is with solid letterforms and open shadows

Page from the book’s interior, with the caption set in News Gothic

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s catalogue of fiction and essays has been re-issued as an audiobook collection by publisher SNR Audio using Futura Display as the main headline typeface.

Each cover also features an original illustration. Designer(s)/artist(s) uncredited.

Early Bird, or the Early Birds, was a country/skiffle band from Friesland, the Netherlands. Formed in 1963, the group was active until 1994. Between around 1969 and 1975, it went under the name Little Ben and His Drivers. The shown album with “country and westernsongs” was released in the Netherlands by Narcis Records as well as Iris Records, and in Germany by Coup Records. The typeface is Futura Display. Designed by Paul Renner and first cast in 1932, it was adopted for dry transfer lettering by Mecanorma around the time the album was released, and is shown in their 1970 catalog.

[More info on Discogs]

An undated record sleeve (early 1960s) by designer Burt Portnoy, featuring his hallmark illustration style with colorful geometric patterns, and using his favorite typeface, Futura Display.

This album with classical music performed by the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leonard Polsky was released by Hi-Life Records, a budget line subsidiary of Bell Records.

[More info on Discogs]

The liner notes are set in Spartan, which can be distinguished from Futura by its two-story a.

Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil’s debut 1962 recordings “Desicão” / “Vem Colombina” restored and reissued on 7″ vinyl for the first time by Day Dreamer Records:

Released in 1962, these two songs are the foreword, the preface and the introduction all rolled into one. They are short, but they contain a huge amount of compressed energy, the seed of something more to come. The following year, Gil met Caetano Veloso and the rest we now know.

To hear the name Gilberto Gil in 1962, simple and unadorned, is to hear it without the glittering coat of MPB, Tropicália, social activism, political struggle and cultural leadership that it came to wear. To listen to “Vem Colombina” in 2022, is to hear no more or less than the first steps of a young man from Bahia, who might go on to become one of the greatest musicians Brazil, and the world, has ever known.

[More info on Discogs]

Spanish-language print ad for the general catalog of Mexican records by record labels OKeh and Vocalion.

Designer Alex Steinweiss chose to depict a big acoustic guitar decorated with ribbons and confetti. (It was Lucian Bernhard, master of the Sachplakat, who got him a job in Joseph Binder’s studio after Steinweiss graduated from Parsons in 1937.)

For the type, Steinweiss went with Futura Display. He used Renner’s 1932 design in loosely spaced caps, set on an angle and with alternating glyph colors. Note the handwritten signature – soon after, Steinweiss would adopt Commercial Script for his name.

Futura Display in use on the Dutch sleeve of a single by English singer Billie Davies (b. 1945). The artist name is set in all caps, while the song titles are in all lowercase letters.

[More info on Discogs]

The first edition cover of Space City News with Annlie Italic and Berthold-Grotesk Bold with its alternate a and w. “20 ¢” is added in Bulletin Typewriter.

Space City News was a short-lived (1969–1972) “New Left” newspaper in Houston, Texas. It focused on the pressing issues of the time, from the Vietnam War and nationwide struggle for civil rights, to police brutality and other matters central to the revolutionary reader base of the time (akin to publications like The Great Speckled Bird and The Chicago Seed), while also spotlighting local issues and artistry.

Notable stories of the first issue include William F. Buckley’s acquisition of local black Houston radio, labor strike coverage, the inadequacies of Texas State welfare program, and – the biggest story – the People’s Park uprising in Berkeley and subsequent police brutality against those protesting the University of California’s desire to turn it into a soccer field.

The first edition was dedicated to Pancho Villa, a general of the Mexican Revolution.

Spread with pages 2 and 3, with headlines in Bulletin Typewriter (left) and Twentieth Century Ultrabold Extended (right).

Detail from page 5, with Playbill and Berthold-Grotesk Bold. The typewriter face seen below is in a Cubic style. Lukas Krakora’s digital Aachen Typewriter comes close.

Spread with pages 6 and 7, Cooper Black (top left) and the Light weight of Berthold-Grotesk (“dallas goon squads of yore”).

Spread with pages 18 and 19, with Cooper Black (left) and headlines in Futura Bold Oblique (or maybe Spartan Black Italic) for “Rocky & Warhol?”, Futura Condensed for “grand jury”, and an unidentified face for “Kindergarten”.

Detail from page 19 with Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed, lettering, and an unidentified typewriter style

Detail from page 19 with contoured Cooper Black and Futura Display for “art cinema”

Detail from page 20 with Ultra Bodoni Extra Condensed and Cheltenham Bold Extra Condensed

Detail from page 23 with “space city news” in Playbill

The current Kabuki Kids menu from Benihana, an American restaurant company that, according to Wikipedia, owns or franchises 116 Japanese-influenced restaurants around the world.

I was amused by the contrast between the rather intense Futura Display and good ol' Comic Sans. The handwriting-style font appears to be a grunged version of Tekton Bold.

This album of various movie themes from the mid to late 1970s features a plethora of typefaces on its cover:

“Themes from Star Wars” – ITC Avant Garde Gothic
“New York, New York” and “As Performed By The Birchwood Pops Orchestra” – Kabel Black
“The Deep” – Deutsch Black
“Black Sunday” – Bulletin Typewriter
“The Greatest” – Stymie
“A Bridge Too Far” – Helvetica
“Annie Hall” – Futura Display
“Exorcist II, The Heretic” – ITC Serif Gothic
“Rollercoaster” – Blippo

[More info on Discogs]

The back cover, nearly identical to the front

This album with five songs by Harry Belafonte on the A side and five by the Islanders on the B side was released by Coronet Records around 1961. The sleeve design is by Burt Portnoy who once more relied on the power of bright colors and Futura Display.

[More info on Discogs]

Cover designer Burt Portnoy loved to work with Futura Display. He relied on Paul Renner’s 1930s design in the style of gas-pipe lettering for several albums by Koko Records. This one is by flamenco guitarist Carlos Varga, released in 1962. Unfortunately, Portnoy misspelled the artist’s name – the back cover and the labels have it right.

[More info on Discogs]

Bona was “the magazine about guys for gays and girls”, Edited by Grant Brodrick and Terry de Ville, it was published in the UK from around 1975. The logo uses Colin Brignall’s Octopuss Shaded ( Letraset, 1974).

1967 single of “Foxy Lady” b/w “Manic Depression” by the British-American psychedelic rock trio. “Foxy Lady” was the opening track of the original British version of the Are You Experienced LP. This is Polydor’s German sleeve that also was used for Scandinavian and Italian markets. No designer is credited. Printed by Ludwig Fr. Noltemeyer, Braunschweig.

[More info at Discogs]

Poke Pachi (Time Trap, Pocket Pachinko) ft. Marvin and Grotesque No. 9

TOMY Pocketmate is a series of mechanical games made for the pocket. They were produced by TOMY Japan between 1975 and 1984, before the success of electronic games such as Game & Watch by Nintendo.

More than 70 games were published worldwide, under different names and appearances. They were known as Pocketmates in Japan, as Pocket Games in the US, and as Pocketeers in the UK.

Lopetz of Büro Destruct is currently designing and editing a book about these toys. In case you are interested in the publication, please get in touch with him. And head over to Flickr to see his little collection of the most cleverly designed Pocketmates.

Shown here is a selection of games with interesting typography. Many of the display typefaces were available from Letraset. The Tomy Pocketmate name and the labels like “Start”, “Goal” etc. are typically in all-caps Futura.

Space Athletic (Moon Shot) ft. Data 70

Catch a Caterpillar ft. Yagi Link Double and ITC Avant Garde Gothic. The top line appears to use Yagi Link Double’s inline.

Galaxian (Star Shooter) ft. Microgramma and Futura Display, with a customized N

Moon Target (Splash Down, Magnet Target) ft. Data 70

Space Invasion (Pocket Vader, Space Invader) ft. Filmotype Quiet and some unidentified Helvetica-like substance

Marbel Catch (Secret Passage, Drop ’n’ Catch) ft. a customized Pump

Election (Time Machine) ft. Data 70

Golf Game ft. outlined Pretorian with a custom M and a mirrored A

Dice Up ft. Davida

Target Game (Target Range) ft. chromatic Profil. The numerals are from an unidentified source.

Frog Fight ft. all-caps Flash and an unidentified Japanese typeface

Hamburger Catch (Burger Catch) ft. numerals from Brush Script. The title is lettering.

German movie poster for Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Set in the 16th century in the Inca Empire, the historical drama was the first of five collaborations between Herzog and Klaus Kinski. The brilliant actor and terrible human being stars in the role of Spanish soldier Lope “El Loco” de Aguirre, who leads a group of conquistadores down the Amazon River in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

The title is shown in caps from Paul Renner’s Futura Schlagzeile, internationally known as Futura Display. The credits are added in Univers.

From The Holding Coat:

Flyer for what was originally titled Victor Frankenstein, this is one of the few Independent-International releases to undergo minimal tinkering. It is generally regarded as the most faithful to Mary Shelley’s novel.

“A Classic Tale of Gothic Horror” is set in a classic Gothic typeface, Old English, and the title in Futura Display, reversed and mostly in all caps.

All-caps Futura Display is used for the title of this book, and it's paired up with Akzidenz-Grotesk Condensed. Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

[More info on ISFDB]