Fresh Meat – “Hobo” Portuguese and German single covers
“Hobo” with B side “If You Can’t Live (You’re Dead)”), Portugal.
Lucky was big in Portugal – thanks to Porto-based Gráficos Reunidos, Lda. and their preference for the latest fashion fads in rub-down lettering. The blue sleeve shown above is the Portuguese version of the 1973 single by Fresh Meat, a short-lived prog rock project by English guitarist Mick Green.
The German release shown below features another, maybe even obscurer (and uglier) face, also from Mecanorma, the French manufacturer of dry-transfer sheets. It follows a similarly naïve approach to type design: Take a basic shape and add cookie-cutter counters. Nope, it doesn’t work like that. Irregardless, the lowercase-only design by Danish illustrator and graphic designer Flemming Bau (b. 1942) was selected as a contest winner (just like Lucky) and issued around 1972 as Bau. You can’t be too picky when you launch 57 new typefaces in 15 months (March 1972 to May 1973), 27 of which were spawned by Mecanorma’s permanent competition – at least that’s the number reported by Dutch trade journal Kontekst.
(Sorry, Flemming! I’m sure you had great fun drawing it, and it must have been fantastic to see it pop up on record sleeves etc. I hope it earned you a few kroner!)
German version.
2 Comments on “Fresh Meat – “Hobo” Portuguese and German single covers”
I’m curious if there is an example of the original Lucky font in its entirety… meaning all the upper and lowercase glyphs and the primary punctuation. Does that exist online somewhere, does anyone know?
Yes! Go to our typeface page for Lucky. There you’ll find a link to the great folks of Daylight Fonts who share our love for rare pre-digital typefaces. Their collection includes a full glyph set of Lucky.