Applepicker – Low Noise, High Output album art
Contributed by Alex Chumak on Jul 9th, 2022. Artwork published in
April 2022
.
Photo: Alex Chumak. License: All Rights Reserved.
Applepicker is a cross-genre solo project run by one of the key figures of the modern Belarusian underground scene: Mikita Arlou. Low Noise, High Output is a compilation of minimalist ambient guitar and synth sketches recorded on tape in Pinsk and Minsk between 2016 and 2020 and remastered in 2022. It marks the first release of the K7 cassette label.
The artwork is reminiscent of the cassette inserts of the 1970s and 1980s, but also intended to look futuristic.
There is not a lot of information on the Zentak font on the Internet, but it can be found in Chartpak Velvet Touch Transfer Lettering Box.
The design was made in Berlin, Germany and finished in Minsk, Belarus, in April 2022.
Photo: Alex Chumak. License: All Rights Reserved.
Photo: Alex Chumak. License: All Rights Reserved.
6 Comments on “Applepicker – Low Noise, High Output album art”
Thank you, Alex! I’m curious: to my knowledge, neither Yagi Universal nor Zentak Grotesk are available in digital form. Did you work with scans of specimens and dry transfer sheets, or did you vectorize the glyphs and create your own fonts?
For Zentak Grotesk: this is basically an adaptation of Akzidenz-Grotesk halbfett, under a different name. It was added as early as in 1965 to Chartpak’s Deca-Dry range of typefaces for dry transfer lettering. Zentak Grotesk was also carried by others. Belgian company Alfac offered a second italic style that appears to be an adaptation of Helvetica Medium Italic, but with a straight-legged R (and ridiculously high dots on i and j). The name suggests that it may originated at the (long defunct) German Zentak Haftdruck GmbH, which in turn was somehow related to Alfac. I haven’t looked deeper into this question, but at least you have some leads now.
Hi Florian, thank you for making the things much clearer! Of course, I’ve noticed the striking resemblance between Zentak and Akzidenz Grotesk, but their differences made me think that this font is an interesting variation of Akzidenz, worth sharing and using.
In this work I used the scanned dry transfer sheets, you’re absolutely right :) But it would be really great to revive these two in digital, especially Yagi Universal. I’ll think about it!
Hey Florian and Alex, there is a digital version of Yagi Universal under the name YagiUhfNo2. It might seem like one of those OPTI level digitizations at first but they included every alternate in the font which is cool.
Hi Quinn, thanks for letting us know! Right, it was done by Claude Pelletier in 2012. I have added this info to our page for Yagi Universal.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, they say, and this digitization indeed includes many alternates. I just wish the font meta data would include some basic info about its origins. Chances are it’s based on the showing in Homage to the Alphabet. This FotoStar specimen shows additional glyphs like an alternate ampersand and various UN ligatures which are not included in YagiUhfNo2. The digital font suffers from unbalanced spacing, has no kerning, and lacks basic characters like apostrophe, quotation marks, en and em dashes, etc.
Ah, I see now. At least the curves are pretty well drawn so someone could easily pick it up and finish the job.
To be clear, I appreciate Claude’s work. The digitization will certainly be useful for a range of uses. In static display typography, the issues with spacing and missing punctuation can easily be fixed by the user.