Curtis Mayfield – Back To The World album art and “Future Shock” / “The Other Side of Town” single cover
Back To The World album cover, Curtom Records, USA, 1973
Milton Glaser was born on this day in 1929. Happy birthday!
In the late 1960s, Glaser designed a set of geometric sans-serif caps with stencil bridges. Originally named Glaser Futura Stencil, the face was first shown in Photo-Lettering’s Yearbook 1969.
This post shows Glaser Stencil in use for the cover of Back to the World, an album by Curtis Mayfield released in 1973 on Curtom and distributed by Buddah Records in Europe. Curtom was the Chicago-based sould label established by Mayfield together with Eddie Thomas.
Art direction by Glen Christensen, creative direction by Milton Sincoff. Gary Wolkowitz provided the illustration. Parts of the artwork were reused for the French picture sleeve for a single release, see below.
![“Future Shock” / “The Other Side of Town” single sleeve, Buddah Records, France, 1973 [More info on Discogs]](https://fiu-original.b-cdn.net/fontsinuse.com/use-images/115/115748/115748.jpeg?filename=36195691004_4ac7800bbf_o_d.jpg)
“Future Shock” / “The Other Side of Town” single sleeve, Buddah Records, France, 1973 [More info on Discogs]
2 Comments on “Curtis Mayfield – Back To The World album art and “Future Shock” / “The Other Side of Town” single cover”
A few hours after we posted this little special with Uses designed by Milton Glaser and such using his typeface designs, I learned that he sadly died, on his 91st birthday. Rest in peace.
New York magazine and the New York Times have obituaries.
While the album cover uses the original Glaser Stencil Bold, the French single features the revised version, distinguished by an M with higher center vertex and a W with two breaks, see this post.
The former also has smaller bridges. I don’t know if Photo-Lettering or Letraset had different designs for different sizes – at least Letraset had to produce size-specific variants for their rub-down sheets. And Photo-Lettering had lettering artists on staff that would have been capable of manual adjustments.