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Cherry by Nico Walker (Alfred A. Knopf)

Cover designer Janet Hansen taps into Lettera, a once common alternative source of letterforms

Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Jun 6th, 2019. Artwork published in
August 2018
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4 Comments on “Cherry by Nico Walker (Alfred A. Knopf)”

  1. I wonder whether Philip Castle or Bill Gold had seen OP-Letter in Lettera 3 when they designed the poster for the theatrical release of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in 1971. With the small off-center counter and the south-east shade, the big round “eyeball” O in this iconic piece of lettering certainly reminds me of the letter in Haettenschweiler’s face.

  2. Fascinating article! I didn’t know much about Lettera, so I’m glad I learned more about this historical source.

  3. I looked a bit deeper into the poster for A Clockwork Orange. While the design is often credited to both American graphic designer Bill Gold and British airbrush artist Philip Castle (and often even exclusively to Gold), it seems that the chosen poster was in fact solely Castle’s work – he did both the portrait of Alex with knife and eyeball, as well as the lettering. Gold apparently did the art direction and layout (?) for a different poster design with an illustration by Don Ivan Punchatz, featuring a crucified Alex on a machine, which remained unused.

    Design Curial has an article from Blueprint magazine in which Philip Castle comments on designing film posters for Stanley Kubrick:

    “I’d been doing that sort of blocked-in lettering and, if anything, it was based on Milton Glazer [sic] – not that I would consciously copy! But it was easy to do that lettering and it suited the film and my design. But I have never thought of myself as a letterer; you have to be so meticulous. This particular lettering is ‘out-of-this-world’, it’s ‘futuristic’, it’s not beautifully finished type. It has a certain drawn quality to it, even though it’s cleaned up. It just fits the movie I think.” […]

    Castle described being riled when someone else was given credit for his poster. Some of his lettering was also changed: “I had to do the lettering for different territories. I had no power, I know. They put dots in where I hadn’t [as counters of letters like ‘R’?]. The ‘E’ at the end has been made different and the ‘S’ is different from my original [cf. the trailer]. But they only used that lettering for the American and English posters. All the others were mine, which I roughed out myself. You can see my ‘E’ is very distinct.

    Castle’s original lettering for the Italian and Spanish language versions. Photography by Steve Mepsted.

  4. That half tone skull is pretty slick.

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