Mobb Deep – The Infamous album art
This cover is emblematic for Mobb Deep. The focus of the design is not on the typography, but the type lends a classic aesthetic of the period to the cover. While the band name is shown in caps from Compacta set on a curve, the title is added in electronically condensed Commercial Script.
The Infamous (stylized as The Infamous…) is the second studio album by the American hip hop duo Mobb Deep. It was released on April 25, 1995, by RCA Records and Loud Records. The album features guest appearances by Nas, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, and Q-Tip. It was largely produced by group member Havoc, with Q-Tip also contributing production while serving as the mixing engineer. Most of the leftover songs from the album became bonus tracks for Mobb Deep’s The Infamous Mobb Deep album (2014). […]
The cover art for The Infamous was created in Queensbridge Houses, New York by photographer Delphine A. Fawundu, who later commented about the photography session in Vikki Tobak’s 2018 analog hip hop photography collective Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop (published by Clarkson Potter), “I was inspired by how all these elements came together, making New York hip-hop such a force at that time. It just felt so powerful and it was all happening right before my eyes, and my camera”. In 2019, images from Fawundu’s photoshoot with Mobb Deep and the previously unseen contact prints were featured in a full-size museum exhibit at The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles.
