Various Artists – New Themes from Motion Pictures album art
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “filmotypeginger”, “filmotypequail”, “filmotypeflyer” and “filmotypewindsor”. License: All Rights Reserved.
Album cover or typeface specimen? The cover for this compilation of “new themes from motion pictures” showcases a range of typefaces for the titles and artists, all of which hail from the Filmotype library.
Design by Murray Stein, with typography by The Composing Room, Inc..
2 Comments on “Various Artists – New Themes from Motion Pictures album art”
Ha! This is the ultimate Filmotype use.
I don’t remember this particular album, but my memory of typography from the sixties is strongly colored by the ubiquity of Filmotype fonts, although I didn’t know it at the time. You don’t see them in the work of famous designers from the period, or even in dry transfer sheets, but they were very common in everyday design work like this. When Stuart Sandler first showed me a Filmotype catalog in 2006, when he was hoping to enlist me to help digitize the fonts (Ginger is one of mine), I had a shock of recognition.
Yes, they really were ubiquitous in that period, certainly in North America! For me, it was Bart Solenthaler’s collection of Volk’s Clip Books of Line Art, record covers, and other vintage items that was an eye opener in this regard. VGC copied the complete Filmotype catalog (without authorization or compensation). This gave the designs a wider distribution and extended their availability into the 1980s and early 1990s: numerous Filmotype faces are shown in Solotype’s 1992 catalog, and also in those by European phototype providers like Typeshop. But VGC gave them alphanumeric codes instead of names – Ginger was “B-11”, for example – and relegated them to the back of their catalogs. Their original names hence were largely forgotten, and Filmotype’s name erased – until Stuart Sandler researched the company’s history and started the digital incarnation.