From record collector oopswhoops:

Killer funky single, produced by Barry White and arranged by Barry White and Gene Page.
1974 French pressing on Warner Bros. label.

The typographic sleeve design relies on the shadow-only Umbra, supported by all-caps Univers 63.

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Front cover featuring Burke’s head in the clouds. Burke’s name (in yellow) and the album title (in white) are set in Filmotype Quiet, surrounded by a decorative border.

I Wish I Knew (1968) is the fourth studio album by soul/gospel singer Solomon Burke, his third for Atlantic Records after Rock ’n Soul four years earlier. Originally panned upon release for “playing it safe” right as the political climate had turned into a erupting volcano, it has become a minor classic in the 57 years since. The title track – penned by Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas – is a heartfelt confession of uncertainty over the possibility of being completely free, while Burke’s rendition of Allen Toussaint’s “Get Out of My Life, Woman” has been sampled (like a lot of other renditions of the song) by multiple artists – including by Dr. Dre on the intro track of The Chronic.

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Back cover featuring rainbow motif. Artist name and album title are set in Franklin Gothic Condensed. Liner notes by Philadelphia DJ and Pennsylvania representative Rev. Louise Bishop are set in News Gothic (regular, bold, italic).

Close-up of back cover. Track list (bold) is also set in News Gothic, and so are the credits (regular). Address info is set in Monotype Clarendon Condensed.

From Wikipedia:

More Hits by The Supremes is the sixth studio album by Motown singing group the Supremes, released in 1965. The album includes two number-one hits: “Stop! In the Name of Love” and “Back in My Arms Again”, as well as the Top 20 single “Nothing but Heartaches”.

Barney Ales, then an executive vice-president of Motown Records, reported in the August 14, 1965 issue of Billboard magazine the album had advance orders estimated at 300,000. More Hits by The Supremes peaked at number six on the U.S. Billboard Top LPs album chart and remained on that chart for 37 weeks. It reached number two on Billboard's R&B album chart. To further underscore their popularity, each girl’s signature was autographed on the album cover.

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From Wikipedia:

We Are Family is the third studio album by the American R&B vocal group Sister Sledge, released on January 22, 1979, in the United States and on April 30, 1979, in the United Kingdom by Cotillion Records. The album was written and produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of the band Chic, and includes four hit singles: the title track, “He’s the Greatest Dancer”, “Lost in Music” and “Thinking of You”, all of which have been sampled, remixed, and reissued in the decades after the album’s release. The album reached number one on the Top R&B Albums chart and peaked at number three on the Billboard 200, making it the band’s most commercially successful album. In 2013, NME named it among the 500 greatest albums of all time.

The title is shown in a digonal band, set in tracked out caps from a light weight of Syncopation, featuring its round-top A. The group’s name is added above in Coronet, with an extended exit stroke on the first S. Art direction by Bob Defrin, with cover photography by Jim Houghton.

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Craft paper cover version

I WAY TO ÄL is Äl Jawala’s anniversary album, presenting the essence of 22 years of musical wanderlust.

“The wild mixture of styles from the Freiburg-based band, which includes Balkan beats, African, Arabic, jazz and funk, is bursting with vitality.” — Stereo

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CD digifile white carton inside out

CD digifile white carton inside out

Double vinyl cover white carton

Double vinyl cover white carton

Double vinyl cover white carton

Double vinyl cover white carton

Passport was formed in 1971 as a jazz fusion group led by saxophonist Klaus Doldinger. This album features Brian Auger, Johnny Griffin, Alexis Korner, Volker Kriegel, and Pete York. It was recorded live October 16, 1973, in Düsseldorf, Germany.

The surrealist airbrush art depicts a partly transparent portrait of Doldinger. A hand emerges from the multicolored mountain ranges holding a mirror with a second face wearing clown makeup. It is credited to Wandrey’s Studio, Hamburg.

The album’s title is in Orbit, spiced up with double outlines, vertical gradient fills, and highlights. The names are in Weiss, which has been Passport’s brand typeface since the self-titled debut album.

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Klaus Doldinger passed away 16 October 2025. Rest in peace.

This purely typographic sleeve features letterforms drawn by four masters of 1970s display type: “Tommy Brown” is Design Sparkly, a thick-thin-thin multline variant of Churchward Design by Joseph Churchward. The song title is set in all-lowercase Motter Ombra by Othmar Motter. Last but not least, the sans in the middle is ITC Avant Garde Gothic by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase.

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Afro-Harping is a 1968 album by harpist Dorothy Ashby, released on Cadet Records. The album blends soul jazz, funk, and orchestral elements, with arrangements by Richard Evans. It features standout tracks like Soul Vibrations and title track, Afro-Harping.

The cover was designed by Jerry Griffith, with the album title set in Amelia.

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Windsor was first issued around 1905, and rediscovered in the 1960s. Here it can be seen on the cover of Insight, the third studio album by the Mike Mainieri Quartet led by vibraphonist Mike Mainieri (b. 1938), released in 1968 by Solid State Records.

Alex Gnidziejko designed the album artwork, featuring a large eye decorated with leafwork and flowers. A fisheye photo of the quartet is shown inside the dilated pupil.

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Black Casual, the phototype adaptation of Walter Haettenschweiler’s Lettre Coupé, is probably best known as one of the arcane alphabets of Black Sabbath: it was used on the cover of their 1970 album Paranoid.

Here it can be seen in use on a 1975 French single sleeve by Seven Seas, with music produced Steve Alaimo, Clarence “Blowfly” Reid, and Willie Clarke.

From record collector oopswhoops:

Excellent Jawsploitation Funk instrumentals.
1975 French pressing on RCA-Victor label.

The record probably was released around the time Steven Spielberg’s JAWS came to movie theaters fifty years ago.

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Paul Renner’s Futura famously was released by the Bauer foundry in 1927. In 1954, Edwin W. Shaar at Intertype added Futura Script, capitalizing on the prestigious name. Apart from the low contrast, the unconnected cursive didn’t have much in common with Renner’s geometric sans.

A designer at Photo-Lettering apparently had a different idea for a “Futura Script”. One that is less chirographic and more in tune with the static geometry of Futura – and also easier to make. Enter Thomac, which basically is Futura, but with joined-up letterforms. The typeface family is shown in four numbered weights in PLINC’s 1971 catalog, without designer info. (Nick Curtis, who explored a similar concept with his Kallilu NF, credits it to George Piscitelle, but that’s unconfirmed.)

The boldest weight, Thomac 10, is used outlined and with drop shadow for Talk to the People, an album by pianist Les McCann (1935–2023) released with Atlantic Records in 1972.

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This new artwork, again utilising false colours and solarising post imaging effects, employs inanityUKMusic’s ‘house’ fonts, Bauhaus 93 and Trajan. For the main track title, I used Proxima Nova, one of the official typefaces of Los Angeles City.

The lower use of the font is in a variety of sizes, mainly due to my poor visual skills. I tried a fix and it seems to not have worked.

The music is a response to the incredible scenes on TV news currently coming from Los Angeles.

The art is garish but contains a selected series of frames of TV footage of a skateboarder walking from exploding tear gas canisters before turning to deliver his rebuke.

The music is a funk/blues-rock vibe – I hope anyone in Los Angeles might appreciate the small gesture of solidarity it is intended to convey. You can listen to it at Old Magnolia Studios.

This image shows a revision of the artwork for “Angeles City Blues“. I preferred the more simpler yet more vivid graphic work. The entire piece of music remains the same, but I added as a bonus the working early mixes with their own art. The layout has be tidied up regarding the placement of track title and info. The fonts remains the same: Trajan Pro, Bauhaus 93, Proxima Nova.

After Stand!, Epic Records sought to release another new record after no musical activity came from the Family Stone – that new record being Greatest Hits; a compilation of prior album singles (excluding A Whole New Thing’s single), which would become their best-selling and most successful album, even peaking at #2 on the Billboard 200. Brand new non-album singles all released in 1969 such as “Everybody Is A Star” / “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” (which uses a bold Burko) and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” also appeared as tracks on the album.

Teresa Alfieri is credited as the album's cover designer, with Stephen Paley for photography credits (in which similar photos appear in another Family Stone album). Robert Montgomery’s Pousse Cafe B appears for both artist name and album name, meanwhile Trade Gothic and the lighter Lightline Gothic are used for additional lettering on the front, gatefold and back. There are other Family Stone reissues/releases that use Pousse Cafe.

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Recently, Sly Stone passed away on June 9, 2025 at the age of 82.

Gatefold by Morgan Ames

Back cover

Uncommon Japanese 1973 quadraphonic release with Riyousuke Mori for design credits

Another 1973 Japanese release

Sandwiched between (and some would say overshadowed by) Dance to the Music and Stand!, Sly and the Family Stone’s Life continued the group’s brand of psychedelic-tinged funk-rock-soul. For the US market, the album produced only one single – the title track “Life” backed with “M’Lady” – which had little impact on the charts.

Above a photomontage of the band as a theater full of people, the uncredited designer chose to juxtapose the filigreed 19th-century Ornamented No. 1539 with the sleeker, more modern Palisade Graphic. For the bichromatic setting of the former, the specific font in use probably is the phototype adaptation made by Headliners in 1964 as part of their Morgan Press Collection.

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Billboard ad (July 13, 1968, p. 19). This time the album/single's title has added (handdrawn?) quotes. The other fonts present are Folio Extra Bold and Kabel.

As Reybach points out in his post about Sly & The Family Stone’s Greatest Hits album, the sleeve for the band’s 1969 single “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” / “Everybody Is A Star” uses Burko.

Burko was designed by Chicago-based designer David L. Burke in October 1967, initially in a Bold weight, and released locally later that year. By 1969, it was revised and expanded to nine styles for Headliners. This exclusively typographic sleeve features the boldest weight, Burko Gorpo, in early use.

The nowadays more commonly known Blippo Black was conceived by Joe Taylor as a weight extension of Burko Bold and released by FotoStar/Facsimile Fonts, also in 1969. Burko Gorpo is different in a number of small details, compare to the glyph set for Blippo Black. Among Burko Gorpo’s unique features seen here are the F with stencil bridge, the wide L, the V with flat (but narrow) base, and the gas-pipe Y. Overall, Burke’s design is a tad wider than the follower.

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From publisher Victionary:

The Vibrant Artistry of the ’60s & ’70s
What comes to mind when one thinks of the vivid and exhilarating visual world of the 1970s? Is it attention-grabbing lettering and clashing colours, groovy paisley motifs and floral patterns reminiscent of hippie culture, or mind-bending psychedelic visuals that transport one to a different dimension? Funkadelic invites readers to step back in time and witness the audacity and dynamism of an era that embraced individuality and pushed artistic boundaries.

An homage to the graphic design trends and styles that embodied bold expression, cultural revolution, and free-spirited creativity, discover a handpicked selection of visual identities and branding design inspired by the iconic aesthetic of the '70s in a visual treasure trove of inspiration and nostalgia for designers, artists, and era enthusiasts alike.

The type and headlines in the book are set in Oakley by Mark van Leeuwen, accompanied by a yet unidentified typeface [edit: it’s BioRhyme by Aoife Mooney, see comments].

Joe Bataan (1942–) is “a Filipino and American Latin soul singer, songwriter and musician” (Wikipedia) who earned himself the title “King of Latin Soul” in the Hispanic and Latino music scene. On the cover of “Mr. New York And The East Side Kids”, he poses for photographer Len Bauman, wearing a striped shirt and sitting on an abstract sculpture, surrounded by friends, kids and colleagues. I have not found information about the location of the cover shot, but it’s likely to be somewhere in Spanish Harlem according to a Blogspot article by “bongohead” about Bataan’s New York hangouts, career and album covers.

The cover typography was designed by Izzy Sanabria who picked Buxom, a follower of Baby Fat by fellow New Yorker Milton Glaser, set in all caps and filled with three colors. The album title is set in Futura.

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Recorded direct-to-disc at Artone Studio, with a stellar cast of European musicians, new album Penta fizzes and sparks with the ingenuity of Ronald Snijders’ flute chops, tight interplay and a palette that spans synths, clavinet, Fender Rhodes, electric bass and sax. A seamless fusion of rhythms, influences and improvisation, Penta has the class of a golden-era jazz-funk record, with the energy and verve of an in-the-pocket live band.

An exposition of Snijders’ virtuosic range and beguiling compositional prowess, Penta traces musical trajectories from Suriname to Europe and back again to fuse a sound that is both timeless and original in equal measure.

Photography by Londonmancer

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Rufus Thomas Live: Doing the Push & Pull at P.J.'s is the first live album by R&B/funk musician, WDIA radio DJ, and eternal teenager in spirit Rufus Thomas, released in 1970 on Stax Records. The cover was designed by Lee Lebowitz at Think Ink under the supervision of Larry Shaw, with photography by Memphis radio personality and photographer Mark Stansbury.

“RUFUS THOMAS LIVE” is set in Jefferson Aeroplane from Photo-Lettering (a distorted and extended version of PLINC Capricorn), with “LIVE” in yellow, overlaid by a circular pattern which appears to be one of a series of pattern effects offered by Photo-Lettering Inc. under the name “Psychemat”. “DOING THE PUSH & PULL AT P.J.’s” is set in Trade Gothic Extended Light. The text on the back cover is set in two weights of Helvetica.

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Close-up of liner notes by WDIA DJ and Thomas' high school history teacher Nat D. Williams on back cover.

Two years after 1970’s Doing the Push & Pull at P.J.’s, Stax Records released Rufus Thomas’s Did You Heard Me? album, the fourth out of many forthcoming albums. Allan Ulmea Studios is credited for front photography, and David Krieger / The Graffiteria for the album’s cover design, which uses Davison Bimbo in the “Contour A” style, with a green/teal fill. Additionally, art direction was handled by Larry Shaw and Ron Gorden.

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Track names and credits on the back are set in two weights of Folio.