[More info on Discogs]

Each Kiss member put out a solo album in 1978. Of the four albums Ace Frehley’s was the most commercially and critically successful. Its success was mostly owed to Ace's cover of “New York Groove”, originally by the band Hello. These single sleeve covers were released in the French market for the lead single from each album, with names in all-lowercase Hot Dog and titles in all-caps Horatio. Art direction by Dennis Woloch, cover paintings by Eraldo Carugati.

[More info on Discogs]

[More info on Discogs]

[More info on Discogs]

Buckshot Roulette is a 2023 tabletop horror video game developed by Mike Klubnika, initially self-published on itch.io before receiving a Steam release in 2024. The game involves the player playing a twisted version of Russian roulette with a shotgun against “The Dealer” or three other players. Everyone plays and only one leaves the room with a fatter wallet and their head intact.

Buckshot Roulette’s typography heavily complements the game's industrial look, reminiscent of grindhouse movies. The serif type for the game’s logo is a Garamond, stretched and possibly with faux bolding. Judging from the angles of the top serifs in T, it’s one of the versions based on Jannon’s work. Easier to identify is Fake Receipt, used as the primary user interface font. Its dotted appearance is further distorted thanks to the in-game pixel filter, giving it a very scratchy look.

Main menu. “Buckshot” is vertically stretched while the text below is slightly squished.

“The Dealer” calmly explains the rules of the game.

A diegetic use of Fake Receipt on the score counter. The Dealer seems either stressed, amused or neither, as I unknowingly shot a live round at myself.

Winning a multiplayer match

Searching for lobbies in multiplayer. Fake Receipt is slightly squished here.

Modifying a lobby

Fake Receipt used in the Multiplayer Update trailer

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.

Dolly Dolittle’s Crime Club is a series of seven crime story compilations, selected by Dr. Dolly Dolittle and published by Diogenes in their paperback imprint, detebe (short for Diogenes Taschenbuch). The cover typeface is Hobo. While the publisher’s name was initially shown in Garamond Italic, it later appeared in Hobo, too. Starting with volume 5, the superscript number uses Edel-Grotesk.

Front cover

From The Idea of the Book:

A book of transcribed quotes in French from the graffitied streets captured during May 1968 events in Paris. Each quote throughout the book is typeset in a different serif or sans serif font, creating a reading experience that feels like a type specimen combined with revolt.

“Les murs ont la parole” was compiled by journalist Julien Besançon (1932–2017) and published in landscape format by Claude Tchou (1923–2010), Paris, in June 1968. In 2018, MIT Press published an English edition under the title The Walls Have the Floor, translated by Henry Vale.

Gérard Lo Monaco (b. 1948) was in charge of the design. The front and back covers are set in Folio, which was known as Caravelle in France. While the title is shown in the Bold weight, stacked and staggered and with added thin and straight quote marks, the smaller text uses the Medium Extended. Many of the typefaces used on the interior pages correspond to Massimo Vignelli’s Canon. See Lo Monaco’s portfolio website for additional pages.

Back cover

The title is set in caps from a Caslon and a Garamond. ITC Founder’s Caslon 42 by Justin Howes is a digital version that comes close to the former.

“Cette fois aussi, c’était au temps des cerises” in Helvetica

Futura and Times New Roman

“Dessous les pavés c’est la plage…” in Bodoni

“JE JOUIS dans les pavés” in a large Caslon, cf. Matthew Carter’s digital Big Caslon

“Ne consommons pas MARX”, combining Futura and Bodoni

“Déculottez vos phrases pour être à la hauteur des sans culottes” in Chicago, see Angelus-Mediäval

From the publisher:

No one loves and quarrels, desires and deceives as boldly or brilliantly as Greek gods and goddesses.

In Stephen Fry’s vivid retelling, we gaze in wonder as wise Athena is born from the cracking open of the great head of Zeus and follow doomed Persephone into the dark and lonely realm of the Underworld. We shiver in fear when Pandora opens her jar of evil torments and watch with joy as the legendary love affair between Eros and Psyche unfolds.

Mythos Illustrated captures these extraordinary myths for our modern age in stunning colour – in all their dazzling and deeply human relevance.

Alias Harbour is used for the book jacket and headline text. See also Harbour in use for Fry’s version of the Greek epic Troy, and a biography of Alexander the Great.

The author’s name is added in Futura.

Text is set in a Garamond.

Cosi Azure (Nikolas Type) for the Louvre exhibition Les Choses. Une histoire de la nature morte (Things. A History of Still Life), appearing on all boutique items (album, tote bag, mug, postcards, eraser) and the catalog where it’s accompanied by a Garamond, Theinhardt (Optimo) and Almoneda (Sudtipos).

About the exhibition:

The exhibition Things, authored by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, proposes a new take on what was long seen as a minor genre, whose name – still life – is intriguing in itself.

Depictions of things, which date back to prehistoric times, are a wonderful window into history. Artists were the first to take things seriously by recognising their presence, imbuing them with life, glorifying their forms and meanings, their power and charm. They captured the ability of objects to fire our imagination – to make us believe, doubt, dream or act.

The exhibition revisits the still-life genre from the perspective of the ongoing dialogue between past and present artists. It sheds new light on our attachment to material things, while covering the history of art from prehistoric axes to Picasso, Chardin, Manet and the readymades of Marcel Duchamp.

The catalog was edited by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and co-published by Lienart Éditions and Louvre éditions. It has 448 pages with 240 illustrations and measures 25.3×28.8×3.7 cm.

Eraser, souvenir from the Boutiques de Musées Louvre

Cosi Azure on the exhibition catalog cover and spine

Quote by Victor Hugo, in Almoneda Bold with discretionary ligatures

Description of Pablo Picasso’s Grande nature morte au guéridon, set in Theinhardt and Garamond

Louvre exhibition mug

Folk songs of England and Wales, performed by the New Symphony Orchestra Of London, conducted by Trevor Harvey, and released by London Records in 1956.

The title combines all-caps Garamond with Goudy Text, a.k.a. Monotype series 292. The latter is here used with its alternate Lombardic Capitals, which were offered as series 293.

[More info on Discogs]

Berkley Books, New York City, 1983

Anne Tyler’s novel Searching for Caleb was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975. Shown here are two paperback editions of later dates.

The one issued by Berkley in 1983 features caps from a phototype version of De Vinne. With the relatively thick bars in E F H and the overall restrained modulation (see the low contrast in E or S), I believe the font in use is Lettergraphics’s Devinne Black (before 1976), which seems to be identical to Castcraft’s Devinne Extra Bold Agency (before 1978). Chances are it’s the same font used for The Eyes of Darkness from 1981.

When Pan Books brought out their paperback for the British market in 1990, they – deliberately or not – went with a similar typeface for the cover. This time it’s Hawthorn, drawn by young Mike Daines (b. 1947) at Letraset in 1968. Apart from the added weight, his rendition stays closer to the original De Vinne Condensed, in terms of stroke weight contrast. Rounds in the bowls of B and R bulge out more. Furthermore, S leans a little to the left (just like in metal De Vinne Condensed), and C and G are quite narrow at the top. These characteristics become more evident when comparing Hawthorn to Roslindale, a more recent interpretation by DJR.

Pan Books, London, 1990

Banco on the cover of a book published by Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1972. From The Book Shed’s description:

Peasant militia defeats Japanese fascist forces in a graphic novel style account. The action is occasionally interrupted by a quotation from Chairman Mao. Illustrations by the Chekiang Fine Arts Institute Drawing Group.

The typeface used for the captions is some sort of Garamond.

Faber & Faber’s first edition of Christopher Priest’s science fiction novel Inverted World has a blue dust jacket with the author’s name and title typeset running sideways in Letraset’s Bombere in white, filling almost the whole front. On the front of the jacket the title also appears set in the top left with the usual horizontal baseline in Times New Roman Bold; the readability of Times has been compromised by printing in black-on-blue. The back jacket has exactly the same design, just with smaller type and without the black Times.

Bombere has a wireframe 3D effect which has a visual ambiguity similar to the Necker cube. A suitable match for the title, Inverted World.

The jacket spine uses Times New Roman Bold Italic in white for the title, and black for the author, but has been “embellished” by reprising the use of Bombere for initial I and W caps.

Underneath the jacket, the book’s spine typesets the title (in all caps) and author in a third typeface, apparently some version of Garamond.

The book was published in 1974, and having long been recognised as a landmark in British Science Fiction, was included in the SF Masterworks collection in 2010. [Wikipedia]

[More info on ISFDB]

“Double Detectives” is a series of medical mystery adventures for kids written by award-winning author and junior doctor Roopa Farooki and published by Oxford University Press.

Marujo by PintassilgoPrints is used all over the book covers and also for titling on the inside pages, as well as for chapter headings and page numbers. The running texts use some form of Garamond. On the back cover there’s a use of Daft Brush, also by PintassilgoPrints. Cover illustrations by Mike Lowery.

This is a 1996 magazine ad for Sonic 3D Blast, a video game released on the Sega Genesis and Sega Saturn videogame consoles.

The large headline text at top uses FF Confidential, while the smaller body text uses Garamond in caps with small caps. “Blue is back” is in FF Trixie, see also this other ad. The vertical Genesis logo at bottom-right is based on Copperplate Gothic.

Source: www.flickr.com Jaap Proost (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

Poster with Picabia’s name broken into syllables. The slab-serif letterforms are printed in two colors, with the inner contour in black. Smaller text is shown in reversed New Clarendon. The poster was produced by Steendrukkerij de Jong & Co in Hilversum.

Poster and catalog to an exhibition of works by Francis Picabia at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum Eindhoven in 1967, by Dutch graphic designer Jan van Toorn.

In a feature for Eye magazine from 1990, Gerard Forde writes about Van Toorn:

His first challenge to official culture came in a series of posters and catalogues for exhibitions organised by Jean Leering at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Van Toorn saw the museum as a manufacturer of art-media ideology and sought a way of jarring consciousness through visual unorthodoxy. Where Modernist predecessors like Max Bill, Otto Treumann and Josef Müller-Brockmann had been content with the least ornate, most rational typefaces – a level of neutrality that Van Toorn viewed as naïve – he sought out the more idiosyncratic fonts, flaunting the typographic taboos of the then all-pervasive International Style. In Van Toorn’s eyes, the post-war period had witnessed the disciplining of graphic design into a gutless mediator between the interests of international economic and institutional forces, and an audience of passive consumers.

In the 1950s and 1960s, designers who yearned for more expressive typographic material struck gold in the Lettera series of alphabet source books. In the preface to the second edition of the first volume, editor Armin Haab characterizes the selection of display letters as “predominantly ornamental in character […], swimming against the current of ‘cold art’ in commercial work”, because “even the coolest variety of design cannot disperse with a touch of the exotic.”

And indeed Van Toorn was a Lettera user! For this exhibition, he worked with an alphabet design named Red Roses. This wide slab serif with double contour and shadow was drawn by Paul Sollberger, a graphic artist from Bern, Switzerland. It’s part of a series of five decorated capital alphabets reproduced in Lettera 1, first issued by Niggli in 1954.

On the poster, Van Toorn shows the magnificent capitals as large as possible, breaking up the artist’s name into three lines. On the catalog, the name takes up the full width of the front cover and the inner flap, and only becomes readable once the booklet is opened.

Source: www.flickr.com David Cabianca. License: All Rights Reserved.

Catalog cover (closed). The catalog has 80 pages and measures 9.5×6.5 inches. It was edited by Jean Leering and printed by Lecturis nv, Eindhoven.

This weekend, Peter Biľak of Typotheque shared the sad news that Van Toorn died on 14 November 2020, aged 88, and commemorates him as “designer, author, educator, proponent of critical design and social engagement. One of the most significant Dutch designers with lasting influence on a generation of designers”.

Source: ftn-books.com FTN Books. License: All Rights Reserved.

Catalog cover and inner flap. The small text is set in what looks like a bold Garamond variant.

From the back cover, in the words of Peter Marin:

The Free People is a photo essay about a new generation of young people and the quality of openness and sharing that permeates their life. It is a book about their music, their work, their mobility, what they read and what they buy, their styles, about why they are free people and how they live.

Much has been made of the Woodstock Music Festival. This is not a book about that festival; it is a book about the people who went there.

The book contains photographs by Swedish photographer Anders Holmquist (1933–2008), with an introduction by Peter Marin. The book was first published by Outerbridge & Dienstfrey in the United States of America in 1969.

The colophon includes notes on the fonts in use:

This book, designed by Samuel N. Antupit, has been produced by offset lithography on seventy pound Hopper offset white vellum paper. The title is set in Cooper Highlight, a variation of the Cooper Black issued by American Typefounders in 1921 and named for Oswald Cooper. This typeface is derived from Cooper’s Old Style (designed in 1919 for Barnhart Brothers & Spindler) which bears more than considerable resemblance to Goudy Antique designed by Frederick W. Goudy in the same year. The smaller display matter is set in Linotype’s Pabst Extra Bold Condensed, derived from another design by the prolific Goudy, Pabst Old Style. The text matter is set in ten point Garamond Light Italic, an Intertype version of the French letter cut in 1620 by Jean Jannon. Jannon’s types were acquired by the French National Printing Office where, in the nineteenth century, they were rediscovered, reissued and mistakenly attributed to Claude Garamond, proprietor of the world’s first independent typefoundry.

You can browse through a digitized copy of the book in the Internet Archive.

Vetřelec (lit. “intruder”, “invader”) is the Czech title of Ridley Scott’s Alien from 1979. The poster for the Czechoslovak release in 1982 was designed by Zdeněk Ziegler, using a bichromatic setting of lowercase Tintoretto for the title. Smaller text is in all-caps Garamond. All type is positioned on an angle.

T-Shirt detail

I designed and printed a King Krule T-shirt as a gift for my girlfriend. I took the photo at a gig we both went to. I wanted to emulate a vintage tour shirt that referenced an album of his that we both love, and the Croxton, an awesome venue near us.

Reference photo

Theatrical one-sheet for Bong Joon Ho's Parasite (2019).

Parasite – original Korean title: 기생충 – is a 2019 South Korean dark comedy thriller directed by Bong Joon Ho (The Host, Mother, Okja, etc.). The typography on the poster and in the trailer uses classic centre-aligned and all caps typography with a twist (the Korean-language poster uses a literal ‘twist’ in the movie logo, see last image).

The movie logo is set in uppercase Gotham, customized with oldstyle serifs on various terminals. On the poster, the director and cast names are set in various weights of Gotham.
Near the top, the tagline “Misplaced Familyhood” is also set in all caps, using Garamond (it looks like it could be Garamond Premier Display).

The nicely animated reviews/blurbs throughout the trailer are set in loosely spaced Linotype Didot eText Italic along with the sources set in Gotham.

The billing block at the end is also set in varying sizes of Linotype Didot.

Parasite title (from trailer).

Blurb (from trailer).

Blurb (from trailer).

Blurbs (from trailer).

Billing block (from trailer).

Original Korean-language poster by Kim Sang-man

Branding, booklet and business cards for the Zozimus Bar in Dublin, Ireland.

Michael J. Moran, popularly known as “Zozimus” was born ca. 1794 in Faddle Abbey in Dublin. He was an Irish street rhymer and also known as the “Blind Bard of the Liberties” and the “Last of the Gleemen”.

We created a tactile and rich print piece, featuring photography of the era, depicting Zozimus through a woodcut illustration, based on a dilapidated charcoal etching we discovered in our research.

Ready, set… go! SPRINT – The Portfolio Issue showcases 23 different portfolio approaches of young HfK Bremen athletes coming from the disciplines of integrated design, digital media and fine arts. Over a 10 week boot camp these young students trained the art of portfolio making. Now they are taking on the fight of the job marked striving for fame, glory and a half decent salary.

SPRINT headlines are set in Savate by We.ch – a free font which is freely inspired by a hand-lettering found in the streets of Ivry-sur-Seine in the suburbs of Paris. Its name refers to the savate, a typically french fighting sport – a perfect match for the “no pain! no gain!” spirit of SPRINT. Less rebellious but rather more classic is the choice of Garamond as text font and Suisse Int’l for marginalia.