Xenon – “Xenon Opera” single cover
According to Discogs, “Xenon appears to be a group of musicians and producers coordinated by Marzio Dance, who was the DJ at Xenon, a Florence (Firenze) discothèque.”
The cover design for their 1985 Italo-Disco single “Xenon Opera” is credited to Dino Marsan
and Virna Comini. In the foreground, we get to to see mask-wearing cyborgs in yellow lab coats, operating screens and keyboards, one of them wielding a futuristic soldering rod.
The letterforms are made from a continuous line, with circular terminals, echoing the electric circuit in the background of the airbrush art. There are several typefaces from the 1970s that come close, like Eggomania, Neo Script, Tangui, to name but a few. In fact, the lettering apparently was made by taking Yagi Link Double and using exclusively its inline. All glyphs can be found back in the typeface design by Teruoki Yagi, including the linking N, the open P, and, most strikingly, the single-stroke X.
Posted by Buro Destruct as #1039 in their Fonts from the Flea Market collection on Flickr.
The back cover is set in all-caps ITC Avant Garde Gothic (with alternates) for the track titles and Futura for the credits.
4 Comments on “Xenon – “Xenon Opera” single cover”
This is pure gold!
Great find! Most innovative use of Yagi I’ve seen. I wish they were more considerate about where the nodes are placed. Spacing wise, “OPERA” is much more effective than “XENON”.
Right – it looks as if the designers simply sealed off every loose end with a node and were so busy with that idea that they forgot about the spacing.
I just remembered that the Yagi series included a ready-made solid companion style to Yagi Link Double, named Yagi Link Light. I’ve seen it in phototype catalogs by Lettergraphics (USA) and Typeshop (Germany). It wasn’t as widely available as the biline variant, which was adopted for dry transfer lettering by Letraset. Still, it could be that this is the style that was used here.
Ah, that makes sense. You reminded me that it’s past time I took those separate FotoStar scans and collated them into a single Yagi family image. So here it is.