Jimmy Cliff – “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” / “Hard Road to Travel” French single cover
Photo by Dick Polak
“Wonderful World, Beautiful People” is a single by Jimmy Cliff, released in October 1969. It became a #6 hit in the UK. The sleeve for the French market – where it failed to chart – uses letterforms from two alphabets designed by Walter Haettenschweiler and reproduced in the Swiss Lettera source books: Gaité from Lettera 2 (1961) and Roaring Twenties from Lettera 3 (1968).
The unknown sleeve designer created a double M ligature for the latter, and made some adjustments to the former, too: Gaité’s D was rotated 180 degrees. Maybe they deemed the slightly descending bottom serif inadequate for a D? The rotated glyph now serves as a de facto lowercase d (the alphabet did include actual lowercase letters). I was flipped as well, as one can tell from the different serif direction compared to T and F. Gaité could have shone brighter with more generous and balanced spacing. On the other hand: props for the attempt to build custom quote marks and a comma from the furcated serifs.
The title of the B-side is added in Univers 83.
