Berliner Philharmoniker – The Planets by Gustav Holst album art
Bordering on LTypI: Platelet for The Planets. Its designer, Conor Mangat, comments on the genesis of his debut typeface:
Platelet grew out of a 4-day workshop given to students—most with no type design experience—at CalArts in October 1992. The brief, from Phil Baines, asked for an original alphabet to be designed for a specific outdoor purpose, taking into consideration the context for usage, appropriateness and meaning, and traditional notions of good typography.
Consequently, Platelet is based directly on characters and figures found on the car license plates in California. Its original character set comprised only a single lowercase alphabet and non-lining figures, ostensibly to complement the existing all-caps characters on the plates. For its commercial release, however, the set was extended to include alternate, small capitals and other commonly used text characters – somewhat ironic considering the original brief had principally been to create specific display faces that weren’t just scaled text faces.
Cover designer Paul Marc Mitchell took advantage of the added small caps, and mixed them with the lowercase forms.
This album with the Berliner Philharmoniker’s rendition of The Planets under Simon Rattle (b. 1955) was first released as a double CD in 2006. Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite is complemented by four additional tracks by contemporary composers – thanks to Colin Matthews, Pluto finally gets acknowledged, too (just to lose its status as a proper planet the same year) – plus a video by Paul Bates.
Warner Classics released a vinyl version with just the original suite and Matthews’ addition in 2025.
