From the onset it became clear that Screen­Fonts a.k.a. Char­ac­ters On The Silver Screen was a very pop­u­lar cat­e­gory on Unzipped, my blog for FontShop BeNeLux. This made me decide to add a second cat­e­gory, My Type of Music, which exam­ines the covers of recently released records.

While on Unzipped I look at the covers of albums cur­rently being released in Bel­gium and The Nether­lands, here I’ll stick to the Amer­i­can releases. Again my main focus is the type used on the covers, but you can bet I’ll have my say on the over­all design as well. Same deal as with Screen­Fonts: when there’s noth­ing inter­est­ing to tell about spe­cific album covers I’ll squarely ignore them. It’s not like I haven’t got any­thing else to do.

The album covers below are from the first half of September.

The del­i­cate and colour­ful illus­tra­tion which adorns the oth­er­wise white cover of Fast Paced World, the fourth album by Cana­dian folk quin­tet by The Duhks reminds me of stained glass win­dows or Art Nou­veau lead came and copper foil glass­work. It gives an airy and lumi­nes­cent qual­ity to the design, and almost makes me for­give the album title and band name set in equally del­i­cate grey – but ulti­mately unin­spired and self-​indulgent – all low­er­case Hel­vetica. And I per­son­ally would have had “the” and “ducks” con­nect dif­fer­ently. If you’re going for min­i­mal typog­ra­phy you should thor­oughly think through every minute detail.

After having the covers for their first two albums Psyence Fic­tion and Never Never Land designed by Futura2000, UNKLE have chosen painted art­work by Mas­sive Attack member Robert del Naja a.k.a. 3D for their new End Titles: Sto­ries For Film and its pre­de­ces­sor War Sto­ries. No type to be seen, yet truly mes­mer­iz­ing covers. See also Shynola’s engross­ing – but quite unset­tling – video for An Eye For An Eye, with ani­ma­tion based on char­ac­ters by 3D.

That Lucky Old Sun by Brian Wilson has a slightly off-​kilter cover. Which is quite appro­pri­ate for this artist. Although I’m not so much a kitsch lover myself, I really love this one, with its vibrant colours and sunny motifs, and the clunky blocky out­lined and shaded sans caps filled with polit­i­cally incor­rect bright yellow and blue gradients.

Equally colour­ful is the globe on the cover of Shall Noise Upon by rock trio Apollo Sun­shine. It nicely con­trasts with the black back­ground which is crammed with very busy white hand drawn illus­tra­tions – lots of cosmic imagery to be found. The refined shapes and sharp serifs of the clas­sic cen­tred Per­petua Titling caps work won­der­fully well with the drawings.

It’s funny to see how main­stream pop acts can get it wrong even when almost get­ting it right. The design for The Block by res­ur­rected boys band New Kids On The Block actu­ally isn’t that bad at all. The hor­i­zon­tal divi­sion with black-and-white por­traits on bright red and orange back­grounds is some­what rem­i­nis­cent of clas­sic crooner acts. Yet I have the same remark as with the Duhks album. By making the type a touch smaller the word groups “New” “Kids On The” “Block” in Com­pacta would’ve syn­chro­nized nicely with the ver­ti­cal colour bands. Now it just looks wrong as “On The” slams into the third band and the “K” care­lessly – and lit­er­ally – crosses the border. This is again one of those cases where atten­tion to details would’ve made for a better design.

As the col­lage that graces the cover for Strawberry Weed by Swedish rock outfit Cae­sars is obvi­ously hand made I can only wonder if the title and band name were actu­ally typed or dig­i­tally repro­duced with FF Magda. The design, with its faded, crudely cut out family pho­tographs and yel­lowy strips of text exudes a feel­ing of ten­der­ness and loss, result­ing in a beau­ti­ful and affect­ing cover. A lesser-​known bit of trivia about FF Magda – it’s one of those “smart” Font­Fonts that can be lay­ered to achieve a mul­ti­tude of out­line and inline effects.

Some­what in the same vein is the sur­pris­ingly un-metal-like cover for Lost In The Sound Of Sep­a­ra­tion by Under­oath. The hand painted design looks very arts-and-crafts-like, with the colour­ful V shapes hint­ing at an ethnic influ­ence. I sus­pect the type is either custom-​made or a cus­tomized ver­sion of an exist­ing font; its slightly unbal­anced and inten­tion­ally awk­ward shapes remind­ing me of the hey­days of grunge.

:: U P D A T E ::

Oh serendip­ity – Simon Robert­son com­ments that merely a week ago he iden­ti­fied the type­face as Silas Dil­worth’s Van­der­mark. I really like that one.

The cover for Hummingbird, Go! by Swedish singer Theresa Ander­s­son is also hand painted, depict­ing a styl­ized land­scape of brightly coloured hills. But I like this one con­sid­er­ably less, and ITC Grimshaw Hand is inte­grated in the image in a pretty unimag­i­na­tive way.

I included the next two covers for the pho­tog­ra­phy rather than for the typog­ra­phy. proVISIONS by Howe Gelb’s Giant Sand fea­tures a strik­ing image of a woman in a blood splat­tered white apron hold­ing some­thing that looks like a big dead fish in her blood­ied hands. The strength of the pic­ture lies in the fact that both the head of the woman and head and tail of the fish are cropped, thus abstract­ing the image and lend­ing it a detached atmos­phere. I don’t agree with having these humon­gous painted Trade Gothic char­ac­ters run over the full width at the bottom, but hey, that’s just me.

And the cover for Sex And Gaso­line by Grammy-​winning coun­try singer Rodney Crow­ell looks very rock’n’roll. Not only does he seem pretty dazed and con­fused – prob­a­bly due to sleep depri­va­tion, loud music, use of illicit sub­stances or all of the above – but when you look past his tan­gled hair and fever­ish eyes you notice the shapely curves of female hips. Yup, that’s one of the perks of being a musi­cian for you. ;) The punk-​style typog­ra­phy – Goudy Old Style and Franklin Gothic – was dis­torted, prob­a­bly by crum­pling the paper and/or moving the orig­i­nal whilst pho­to­copy­ing, so this isn’t Frankie.

I wonder inhow­far the designer of This Is A Fix by The Auto­matic perused the Bar­bara Kruger Graphic Stan­dards Manual, as the pho­to­graph over­laid with Futura Bold and Bold Italic in a red box looks heav­ily influ­enced by the work of Amer­i­can con­cep­tual artist Bar­bara Kruger.

The cover image for Invisible Cinema is as immac­u­lately groomed as jazz pianist Aaron Parks him­self. The earthy mono­chro­matic qual­ity of the pic­ture is very styl­ish and makes Parks’ face pop up from the back­ground. Above the worn door behind Parks all caps ITC Avant Garde Gothic is com­bined with Ele­phant, the pecu­liar take on British grotesques by Gareth Hague.

The Chem­i­cal Broth­ers go pop art with their new great­est hits com­pi­la­tion Brotherhood. The covers of the sin­gles included in the com­pi­la­tion are repro­duced as a checker board of colour­ful silkscreen prints. It is some­what rem­i­nis­cent of U2’s Achtung Baby, but a nice upbeat cover nonethe­less.

Like I wrote in my last My Type of Music entry on Unzipped I find Knowle West Boy by Tricky a way too safe album cover for such an adven­tur­ous musi­cal talent. There’s a mod­er­ate dose of weird­ness in the image depict­ing Tricky wear­ing a Venet­ian mask, but the very safe over­all com­po­si­tion and big Hel­vetica Con­densed caps don’t really do it for me.

Hey, isn’t this a con­tender for the LTypI pool? The font on All Or Noth­ing, the sopho­more album for Eng­lish trio The Sub­ways is Edward John­ston’s type for the London Under­ground – yep, that’s the British ‘subway’ for you. A-ha! Johnston’s sem­i­nal design was orig­i­nally dig­i­tized in 1997 as P22 John­ston Under­ground. The 1999 ver­sion ITC John­ston had the advan­tage of coming in three weights. Yet the defin­i­tive dig­i­tal ver­sion is the recently released feature-​rich Open­Type Pro family P22 Underground.

BTW I think Brent and Cole would agree this is one awe­some image.

Two beau­ti­fully designed and illus­trated covers in a row. The sym­met­ri­cal and geo­met­ric design Lightbulbs by Fujiya & Miyagi looks like a con­tem­po­rary take on Art Deco, with gra­cious sans caps spelling out the band name. Admire the cur­va­cious amper­sand. Fun detail: the lumi­nous pat­tern around the light­bulb refers to the strobe dots on the side of a turntable platter.

:: U P D A T E ::

Reader Páll Rokk com­ments that “[t]he Fujiya & Miyagi cover derives from the work of Deutscher Werk­bund designer/architect Peter Behrens for AEG. Behrens designed sim­i­lar ads fea­tur­ing light­bulbs, as well as the light­bulbs them­selves and the fac­to­ries where they were made. The logo is the giveaway.”

And Carried To Dust is per­fectly con­sis­tent with the Calex­ico “cor­po­rate iden­tity” of having sten­cil graffiti-​style illus­tra­tions on the cover. The strict geo­met­ric hand drawn let­ter­ing nicely com­ple­ments the design.

I don’t know about this one. I can’t decide whether I find the album cover for Mothertongue by New York com­poser Nico Muhly a little intrigu­ing, a little unsavoury or a little self-​important. Theall­capsInter­statewith­noword­spaces at the bottom of the cover makes me lean toward the latter.

I really need to have either my eyes or my head checked. Yes I know the image on Death Mag­netic by Metal­lica rep­re­sents a coffin shaped hole with iron shav­ings reveal­ing mag­netic pat­terns around it. For an album called Death Mag­netic? Oooh, how orig­i­nal! What amount of research went into this! Nev­er­the­less, when look­ing at it from a dis­tance I keep seeing a… errr… well… is it just me?

Read more about the fine-​tuning of the clas­sic Metal­lica logo on Brand New.

The Hungry Saw by Tin­der­sticks on the other hand uses an inge­nious metaphor for heart­break which is trans­lated in a low-​key but beau­ti­ful image, lit­er­ally carved in stone and writ­ten on the wall (anyone know any more clichés?). The type is obvi­ously hand made, yet looks quite sim­i­lar to the joyous FF Providence.

Jean-​Michel Folon gets updated for the 21st cen­tury on the album cover for O Sound­track My Heart, the first inter­na­tional effort on Warp Records by Aus­tralian group Pivot. The art is by French artist Michel Granger, who amongst others pro­vided a series of iconic album covers for French synth legend Jean Michel Jarre. Simple, effec­tive, and drop dead gorgeous.

I just wanted to men­tion that Hey Ma, the first album in nearly 10 years for British rock band James (a) looks really creepy and makes me feel uneasy, and (b) the band name is set in a cus­tomized ver­sion of ITC Baskerville – yup, the ver­sion with an x-height so big you can drive a truck through it. And the let­ters on the wooden blocks are Cooper Black of course.

The album cover for Gift Of Screws by ex-​Fleetwood Mac gui­tarist Lind­sey Buck­ing­ham strikes a del­i­cate bal­ance between main­stream and indie. The dif­fer­ent ele­ments that make up the design – sepia tinted por­trait of the artist and clas­sic look­ing all caps Fedra Sans – are to be expected on a main­stream release. Yet the out of focus and out of centre qual­ity of the pho­to­graph gives the design that wel­come extra bite. And the posi­tion of the type makes it even more inter­est­ing – the top of the char­ac­ters are cut off by the top edge of the cover, part of the type runs over Buckingham’s fore­head and hair, and the white let­ters on the light grey back­ground almost com­pletely fade away. Although at first sight the com­po­si­tion may seem a bit dis­or­derly, I find the typog­ra­phy actu­ally very thought­ful and solid.

Far less thought­ful and solid is Year Of The Gen­tle­man by R&B singer Ne-​Yo. We have sim­i­lar design ele­ments that make up the album cover, but this time the end result is truly dis­or­derly and for­get­table. Set­ting the artist’s name in Hel­vetica caps is an unin­spired move, and let’s be honest, it just doesn’t look good. Fair enough, the album title in Bick­ham Script is ade­quately com­posed, using the cor­rect swashes (which hardly is the merit of the designer as they are han­dled auto­mat­i­cally in the Open­Type Pro ver­sion). But the way they’ve both been lumped together in that non­de­script and clut­tered area of the image just ruins this cover.

This proves that to achieve good and read­able typog­ra­phy you have to care­fully bal­ance the dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria, just like in a math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion. In both exam­ples the read­abil­ity is dimin­ished, and the con­text deter­mines how suc­cess­ful the design­ers deal with this.

In the Buck­ing­ham cover the white let­ters on light back­ground indeed tend to blend in (neg­a­tive value), so this is com­pen­sated by using large type (pos­i­tive value) in a simple and straight­for­ward com­po­si­tion (pos­i­tive value). This in turn gives the designer enough leeway to cut off the top of the char­ac­ters in the first line (slightly neg­a­tive value) and use pretty tight track­ing and lead­ing (slightly neg­a­tive value).

Con­versely, in the Ne-​Yo cover the type is posi­tioned in a busy area of the image with con­trast­ing light and dark ele­ments (neg­a­tive value). The jux­ta­po­si­tion of the sans caps and swashy script looks con­vo­luted (neg­a­tive value), and part of the black type is poorly read­able against those dark ele­ments (neg­a­tive value), espe­cially so since the shape and size of those dark ele­ments is very sim­i­lar to the shape and size of the let­ters, thus cre­at­ing visual inter­fer­ence (neg­a­tive value).

Typog­ra­phy may not be quan­tum mechan­ics, but it sure helps to have some basic notion of how math­e­mat­ics and physics work. ;)

Tags: album covers, lettering, music