On Friday the 13th of February 1970, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler and Ozzy Osbourne released their first album, the self-titled record Black Sabbath. Just seven quick months later, the band put out their second full-length release, Paranoid in September of the same year. Between these two albums, Black Sabbath had several of their greatest hits of all time, including songs like “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” “The Wizard,” and “Paranoid” and helped pave the way for the creation of genres like heavy metal, doom metal, stoner rock, and goth.

2020 is a lot of things, but it also celebrates 50 years of Black Sabbath and Paranoid. Here is a bootleg cassette containing both albums in full on their respective side, all dubbed on one 90 minute cassette. Original j-card design from Chaotic No Good, two-color risograph printed by Martian Press.

As mentioned in a previous post on Fonts in Use, in 1972 and '73 the typeface Marvin was used on tour flyers promoting Sabbath’s shows in Germany. Although it may now seem strange to view the band’s name in this flair-filed hippie-invoking font, I’d like to pose this as an accurate depiction of the young band’s psychedelic-induced horror and the distorted blues riffs of their earliest years. Black Sabbath is hippie.

The secondary typeface in this design is a modified version of Bookman Old Style. Since there is no digital version of Marvin available, letters on this design were hand placed and kerned from a photo of the font's type-specimen.

Shawn & Team is a series of animated educational videos produced by Coilbook.

Shawn the Train and his friends go on many adventures. During these adventures, they learn the value of friendship as they rely on one another. As they conquer each adventure, they also learn numbers, colors, and letters. This series helps early learners develop literacy and numeracy skills. — dcmp.org

The titles are set in the bold style of Bookman Old Style, the version of Bookman that comes bundled with MS Office. The locomotive logo uses Arial Black.

Title card from episode 1, “The Mine Adventure”.

Current Tumblr logo, redrawn for 2013.

From 2007 to 2013, the logo for blogging platform Tumblr was Bookman Old Style with very little adjustment. Considering that Bookman dates back to 1860, the mark looked remarkably contemporary. The glassy fill and occassional bubbly outline had something to do with that, but even without the effects it felt pretty fresh. Chalk it up to a super-tight, all-lowercase setting.

Around the time of their Yahoo! acquisition in mid-2013, the company refined its logo, redrawing the letters for an even tighter, more customized fit. The ‘t’ was narrowed, the ‘u’ lost its leading serif, the arm of the ‘r’ extends just a bit further, and the ‘u’ and ‘m’ curves were given a smoother connection to the stems, resulting in rounder (perhaps friendlier) counter shapes.

Tumblr’s April 2007 dashboard redesign.

The Tumblr homepage in May 2007. Looking back at this in 2013, with today’s design trends firmly in flatland, it appears that the pendulum of style took about six years to swing.

Tumblr’s October 2007 dashboard redesign said farewell to the Davidville flower.

Tumblr homepage, 2011. The glossy Bookman logo survived virtually unchanged from 2007 to 2013. Only the spacing got tighter (period no longer straying from the word), shadows varied slightly, and shapes were fine tuned.

Tumblr dashboard, 2011.

Outline/sticker variation of the logo, introduced sometime in 2009.

Election, directed by Alexander Payne
Title designer: Victoria Vaus