Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola, Jean-Luc Ponty – The Rite of Strings album art
The late Argentine designer Luis Siquot (1945–2025) has left us with several typeface designs. We’ve seen his ITC Juanita in use for a book with paintings of African wildlife. Siquot also takes credit for a couple of album covers.
Shown here is his design for The Rite of Strings. The acoustic jazz fusion album by guitarist Al Di Meola, bassist Stanley Clarke, and violinist Jean-Luc Ponty was recorded at Studio 56, after the trio’s six-month world tour in 1995, and released by Gai Saber.
The cover shows a stylized illustration of the three kinds of string instruments, with many strong colors blended into each other.
For the typography, Siquot didn’t use his own fonts. The main typeface is Retro Bold. The all-caps slab serif was designed by Andrew Smith and Colin Brignall, quoting the Constructivist, Bauhaus, Art Deco, and Streamline movements as influences. It was issued in 1992 as one of Letraset’s last releases to be produced for dry transfer lettering, before switching entirely to their digital Fontek range.
The credits as well as the track names on the back and the CD itself are added in Lithos. Released in 1989 in Adobe’s fledgling Originals program, the lapidary sans was among Carol Twombly’s first published type designs for the Californian software company, together with Charlemagne and Trajan, and became quite ubiquitous in 1990s desktop publishing. “Artist management” is added in a bold italic style from Adobe Garamond by her colleague Robert Slimbach, also from 1989.
The Legal Notice sticker applied to this promotional copy features another Adobe release from 1989: for a while, David Siegel’s Tekton became at least as popular as Lithos, but since then has fallen out of fashion even more thoroughly.
