Blue Swede – “Silly Milly” / “Lonely Sunday Afternoon” German single cover
Contributed by Garrison Martin
on Aug 2nd, 2025. Artwork published in
.
Source: www.45cat.com License: All Rights Reserved.
EMI Electrola single sleeve for Blue Swede’s “Silly Milly” (B-side “Lonely Sunday Afternoon”), a follow-up to 1973’s worldwide smash hit “Hooked One A Feeling”. Prominently featuring Porker Outline by Alphabet Photosetting for the band name. There looks to be two variants. Song title is set in an outline w/inline version (giving the appearance of a lighter inner-character).
Source: www.theprintarkive.co.uk License: All Rights Reserved.
6 Comments on “Blue Swede – “Silly Milly” / “Lonely Sunday Afternoon” German single cover”
That’s an interesting find! Thanks for sharing, Garrison.
I agree that the band name looks like Porker. The contoured variant for the song name matches Roundel, though.
Porker is a film typeface that, as you showed, appears in catalogs by Alphabet Photosetting – without credits, as far as I know. Roundel is a typeface that was produced for dry transfer lettering by Mecanorma, the French Letraset competitor. In their 1975 catalog, it’s credited to John Hamon. I compared Porker to Roundel: apart from the contour in the latter, they are basically the same design. This suggests that Porker is by Hamon as well. A phototype version of Roundel is listed in a 1984 catalog by Alphabet Photosetting, too. It looks like the design originated at the London-based phototype company – in three styles: Porker, Porker Outline, and Roundel.
The single sleeve was printed by Druckhaus Maack KG in Lüdenscheid, Germany. To my knowledge, typefaces by Alphabet weren’t really available in Germany … but Mecanorma’s products were. I can imagine that “Blue Swede” technically isn’t Porker, but a modified Roundel, with the inline letterforms and the interspace colored in light blue, and the outline/contour in a darker shade. Since I can’t be sure about that, let’s tag both Porker and Roundel.
Hey! I digitized the font. Here: www.behance.net/gallery/243…
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I fixed it.
Thank you. I know about “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, but let me just say that this needs work. My advise is: first things first. I see you drew Cyrillic characters, but the basic alphabet suffers from inconsistent line widths and sizes. There’s kerning, but it doesn’t really improve the spacing.
You’re welcome, Florian, but some glyph strokes in the entire font had some problems.