Chwast Art Tone in relatively early use for the cover of Soul Food by jazz pianist Bobby Timmons (1935–1974).
Don Schlitten’s design packages the soul jazz in a can, making a tongue-in-cheek reference to “canned music”, a derogatory term for pre-recorded (as opposed to live-performed) music. Art Tone’s bottom-heavy letterforms are shown with some perspective distortion, to match three-dimensional illustration. Such “circoflair techniques”, as Photo-Lettering, Inc. liked to call them, had become possible with phototype, and were realized with optical lenses. The specific variant is listed as “Dip Plumb Curve” in their Alphabet Thesaurus, Vol. 2 from 1965.
Seymour Chwast developed this peculiar typeface from a single letter a drawn for Artone Ink at Push Pin Studios in 1964. According to Steven Heller’s Design Literacy it was expanded into a full alphabet for the client and released by Photo-Lettering in the same year. It’s not yet shown in their 1965 catalog, though.
The album was recorded on September 30 and October 14, 1966 [Wikipedia] and comes with liner notes by Peter Drew dated Dec. 1966. Most sources state that the album was released still in the same year.
[More info on Discogs]
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Chwast Art Tone was digitized by Humberto Gillan as Dogsmoke.