Bobby Timmons – Soul Food album art
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.
Two of Photo-Lettering’s “Circoflair” techniques, the “Dip Fan Curve” and the “Dip Plumb Curve”, as shown in the Alphabet Thesaurus, Vol. 2, 1965. See the full spread with more options in Nick Sherman’s Flickr photostream.
The back cover shows the title and the artist’s name in undistorted Art Tone, with track listing and liner notes set in News Gothic.
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Chwast Art Tone was digitized by Humberto Gillan as Dogsmoke.