La Vibora / Die Schlange (FidulaFon) album art
La Vibora (“The Snake”) is a collection of Mexican children’s songs for playing and dancing, released in the Liederblattreihe Mosaik series by FidulaFon, the label of Austrian-German publisher Fidula-Verlag in 1982. Directed and arranged by José Posada-Charrúa and transcribed by Hiltraud Reckmann, the record comes with vocals and additionally in an instrumental version.
Both cover designs prominently feature Stripes. The cover for the instrumental version is exclusively typographic. The multiline face designed by Tony Wenman for Letraset in 1973 is here used in a playful and unconstrained way. Some of the letters were linked up by the use of alternates. At the center is a snake composed from letterforms, punctuation glyphs, and other bits and pieces found on the dry transfer sheet, arranged on a winding baseline. The track names are set in caps from ITC Avant Garde Gothic Condensed. On the other cover version (below), the dance is over: The serpent has been caught by the eagle of Anahuac – this scene is depicted in the Mexican coat of arms.
Johannes Holzmeister (1923–2002), who founded the Fidula-Verlag in 1948, is credited with the design. A CD version of the album is still available from Fidula – and its cover still uses Stripes.
This use of Stripes may not be the most refined one, but it’s probably my favorite. This post goes out to Iván Moreno, type designer from Mexico, who recently released his Octothorpe, a massively expanded reinterpretation of Stripes. ¡Muchas gracias!
Detail showing the snaky swash extension, complete with a tongue which probably was trimmed with an X-Acto knife.
Note the rotated ampersand that here serves more as a separator than a connector.
1 Comment on “La Vibora / Die Schlange (FidulaFon) album art”
Those uses that made something completely unexpected are my favorite uses as well, this one has a little bit of everything, from the great combination with Avant Garde to the use of characters to represent a snake dancing (in the game the first person or the head runs and everyone grabbed by each other hand has to follow wherever that person goes and pass to an arch of two people again and again until the songs ends, when this happen that player loses and the last standing wins, it is very popular at weddings too), the word MEXIKO in it and one of the few if not only early and correct uses of the dieresis accent.
On the second cover with the Mexican coat of arms, they tried another nice thing with the word SPIEL-UND, first with the SP union which cuts a section of the letter S and a kind of swash with the letter P rotated upside down, those are great examples of what designers did with those restrictions.
Thank you for the mention, Florian, and to the Fonts In Use staff and all the contributors that made the effort worth it. Vielen Dank!