Miles Davis & Gil Evans – Quiet Nights album art
Contributed by Garrison Martin on May 18th, 2018. Artwork published in
December 1963
.
Source: www.milesdavis.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Quiet Nights is Miles Davis’ fourth album made in collaboration with Gil Evans, released in December 1963 on Columbia Records. The cover typography uses reversed Folio with its novel biform characters for a e m n r in a stacked and justified setting.
8 Comments on “Miles Davis & Gil Evans – Quiet Nights album art”
I had assumed that the biform glyphs were additions made in some bastardized phototype version … but no! These letterforms were officially included in Bauer’s foundry version of Folio breithalbfett, together with alternates for Q and R.
See more Folio Biform.
Folio looks more gorgeous everyday! It should see a lot more modern usage!
Great use, and thanks to Florian for digging up that sample – and making FIU such an informative place in general!
You’re most welcome, Benedikt! It’s a team effort.
Indra has shared a useful image with an overview of the Folio family. All members had straight-legged alternates for R. The Q alts with straight bar are only missing from the schmalfett and eng styles. The biform variants are exclusive to the breithalbfett and breitfett.
Unexpectedly, Roboto also includes unicase capitals (specifically, aemnu) as an alternate, included in the obliques and the condensed weights, but not Roboto Slab. I’ve never seen them used.
I have surveyed the many Folio specimens in our collection at Letterform Archive and can estimate that the biform alternates were added sometime after 1965, because they only appear in specimens which include the typeface’s eng style, which was released in 1966. The alts are not present in the foundry’s 1963 schriftenkartei for breitfett.
1965 is too late. Note that the Quiet Nights album was released in 1963.
The “new concept of five lower case characters— a e m n r—cut to the height of the upper case characters” was introduced with Folio Medium Extended, and is mentioned as such in an article published at a time when the foundry version comprised ten styles incl. schmalmager and schmalhalbfett, but excluding the breitfett, i.e. between 1962 and 1963.
I don’t know why the Schriftenkartei index card lacks the alternates – maybe it was a space issue, or this novelty feature was deemed inappropriate to include.
Good catch, thanks! I shouldn’t have said that a lack of specimens is a confirmation of the date. A common pitfall I should know to avoid by now.