I hate it when this hap­pens. I mean, yes it’s good but no it’s not good. The album cover for Beck - Modern Guilt is well designed of course, with intrigu­ing black and white pho­tog­ra­phy and clean straight­for­ward typog­ra­phy in Hel­vetica caps, very much in the Inter­na­tional Style. But I’d expect an artist like Beck to be look­ing for­ward instead of back­wards. Or at least find a con­tem­po­rary twist to this worn-​out style.

Yes, the sev­en­ties are back in full force. We noticed the resur­gence of typ­i­cal cheesy sev­en­ties dis­play faces since a good while now, and recently more specif­i­cally very dark con­structed geo­met­ric designs like Black Boton, Blocks, Cor­pu­lent, Doufff, Unovis, Sinaloa and the likes.

I don’t rec­og­nize the one on G.Love & Spe­cial Sauce - Super­hero Brother but I don’t think it was such a good idea to extrude the type. The black 3D effect cre­ates an odd inter­fer­ence with the pat­tern in the green striped ver­sion of the face.

Primal Scream - Beau­ti­ful Future on the other hand has Milton Glaser's clas­sic Baby Teeth on the cover, another exam­ple of that style of dis­play faces. The only dig­i­ti­za­tion I know of is ParaType’s Bebit.

Some more sev­en­ties nos­tal­gia can be found on Sharleen Spi­teri - Melody. Both the image qual­ity of the creased pho­to­graph and the colour­ful type look very authen­tic. Caslon Graphique is one of those typ­i­cal fat faces (high-​contrast very bold serif faces) that were fre­quently used for head­lines in sev­en­ties mag­a­zines and ads. My part­ner in font geek­ery Stephen Coles once made this handy list of extra bold, ultra black fonts for The FontFeed.

Another “trend” last month were the con­densed grotesques. On Klaus Schulze & Lisa Ger­rard - Farscape it’s the inescapable Hel­vetica Con­densed. The fact that it’s set in spaced caps out makes it look like an eight­ies design. The ethe­real image is captivating.

It’s Hel­vetica Con­densed all caps again on Tricky - Knowle West Boy, on what I think is a way too safe album cover for such an adven­tur­ous musi­cal talent. Same prob­lem here as with Beck.

And Patti Smith & Kevin Shields - The Coral Sea uses Univers Con­densed (Helvetica’s grown-​up sib­ling and the true Mod­ernist type­face). The album cover looks like it’s for a sev­en­ties avant jazz outfit or a con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal ensemble.

Stereo MCs - Double Bubble fea­tures a colour­ful op art graphic which seems to spin, just like a record. Quite appro­pri­ate for a hip hop outfit. ;) The type on the orange sticker looks a bit like a mod­i­fied Aachen or Aldo Novarese’s pecu­liar Colos­salis, a slab serif which com­bines angu­lar cut-​off cor­ners on the out­side of the char­ac­ter shapes with smooth round ones on the inside.

This is a bit bizarre. For Zack de la Rocha and Jon Theodore’s col­lab­o­ra­tive project One Day As A Lion the arche­typ­i­cal com­puter font Ver­dana by living legend Matthew Carter has been cut out and sprayed on the album cover, which makes for an unusual pair­ing of media. But the end result in black and white with cyan type looks convincing.

Ah, the won­drous Carla Bruni. Even after becom­ing France’s first lady she still finds the time to record a new album. I wonder if her new posi­tion (no pun intended ;) helps her fur­ther her musi­cal career, or is that just me being sarcastic?

Comme si de rien n’était betrays that Carla – being an ex-​model – still has her con­nec­tions in the pho­tog­ra­phy world and knows a thing or two about how to present her­self. The image is flaw­less, so having only her name in low­er­case in a skinny weight of H&FJ Gotham grace the cover is an under­stand­able design option.

I love this one. Randy Newman - Harps And Angels nicely ref­er­ences clas­sic jazz album covers. The sub­dued colour scheme of the image is gor­geous, and the set­ting is re
ally witty, with Randy Newman in a tuxedo play­ing the key­board in front of a row of mopeds. This per­fectly reflects the humoris­tic and slightly left­field atmos­phere of Newman’s songs. The type fits per­fectly; all caps Stymie Black for the artist’s name and a very nice sur­prise for the album title. Volta is a lesser known slab serif some­what sim­i­lar to Claren­don and Egizio/Belizio but wider and with a dis­tinct vin­tage feel to it. And will you look at that delight­ful slanted roman… it sure hits all the right spots.