Gábor Szabó – 1969 album art
Ronné Bonder is best known as the designer of many popular typefaces for ITC, like Grouch, Honda, Machine, Neon, and Pioneer, all made together with his creative partner Tom Carnase.
In 1969, he also designed three record covers. On one of them, for an album by Hungarian American guitarist Gábor Szabó (1936–1982), he worked with Pretorian for the type. This English design from around 1900 was revived by Photo-Lettering in 1962, as part of their “Art Nouveau Xenotypes”. It met the zeitgeist and was also adopted by Letraset in the 1970s.
On the back cover, jazz critic Leonard Feather labels Szabó “the Nureyev of the guitar”, probably because he emigrated to the United States from a country behind the Iron Curtain, like the Soviet dancer. Born in Budapest, the guitarist came to California following the crushed Hungarian revolution of 1956.
Ronné Bonder himself was a European emigre, too. Born in 1935, he spent his formative years in Milan, Italy, and came to New York at age 18 on the Andrea Doria. In addition to becoming a successful designer and commercial artist, he also ran businesses in advertising, travel, costume jewelry and boutique liquor. Bonder died in 2015.
