Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left album art
Contributed by Antoine Pazat
on Jan 25th, 2026. Artwork published in
.
Five Leaves Left is the first studio album by English musician Nick Drake. It was recorded at Sound Techniques Studio in London and released in 1969 by Island Records.
The picture was taken by Keith Morris. There are no credits for the graphic design or layout [edit: it’s by Diogenic Attempts, see comments].
Filmotype Zither is used for the artist’s name, accompanied by Gill Sans in all caps (and with questionable kerning) for the album’s title.
5 Comments on “Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left album art”
Holy kern!
Designed by Diogenic Attempts Ltd., as is mentioned in all probably all the vinyl and CD presses of the album (check with Discogs), and is as well mentioned in the Island 50 reissue series on CD, which I’m holding now in my hands.
Oh yes, that lovely space, like so often found in typesetting back then!
It’s important to remember that at that time, photocomposition wasn’t a finished product: this technology only allowed to product a photo print (on paper or film) of a word, a title, or a block of text—in every way similar to a photograph (called “lith”: without shades of gray). It was then up to a layout artist to create the page: aligning, cutting, pasting, and consequently, with opportunity to manually modify each element of their layout and correct this type of flaw.
Talking about kerning as we understand it today can be an anachronism because phototypesetting didn’t involve instructions associated with a given typeface (as is the case today, contained in font files), but rather a mechanical kerning, whatever the font, done roughly in dots by the machine.
And this, among other things, was what made the difference between the major brands: Agfa-Compugraphic, Berthold, Linotype, etc., spoke of their typesetting machines thus equipped, more or less finely, with Aesthetic Tables.
Thanks, an open grave! Credit added.
Ah, that clears things up. Thank you for the info, Martier!