Bill Justis – More Instrumental Hits by Bill Justis album art
Contributed by Javi Gonzalez on Oct 12th, 2024. Artwork published in
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Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grown up in Memphis, Tennessee, Bill Justis (1926–1982) was an American pioneer rock and roll musician, composer, and musical arranger, best known for his 1957 Grammy Hall of Fame song, “Raunchy”.
The typographic cover shown here is for an album with instrumental hits, released in 1965 on Smash Records, a subsidiary of Mercury Records. The uncredited design mimicks a concertina fold, with the lines of text alternating between slanted and backslanted treatments.
4 Comments on “Bill Justis – More Instrumental Hits by Bill Justis album art”
That’s an interesting piece of typography. Thanks for sharing, Javi!
You correctly identified Rodgers and Futura Condensed. The italic fatface appears to be Surf. Filmotype also had the italic Troy and Tripoli, but I’d argue those don’t quite have the right mix of weight and proportions. Surf, on the other hand, looks like a match when slanted and slightly squeezed.
As far as I know, the Filmotype machine didn’t allow for such optical modifications. This suggest to me that the typography was produced with Filmotype fonts, but on a different machine that offered more options. One such machine of note was VGC’s Photo Typositor. VGC copied all of Filmotype’s fonts and included them with their hardware – which used the same 2-inch film format. The Photo Typositor was invented in 1959 and rose to prominence in the mid-1960s, so the timeline checks out.
Filmotype Rodgers was used in the 1963 album Beatrice Et Benedict by some Various Artists
In 1959, Filmotype Rodgers was (I believe) first used in Big City Dance Party by Bill Doggett
Lerner & Loewe Favorites by the International Pop Orchestra used Filmotype Rodgers with its lowercase in 1964.