Vicente Fernández – ¡Arriba Huentitán! album art
Contributed by Javi Gonzalez on Jan 26th, 2025. Artwork published in
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Arriba Huentitán is an album by Mexican singer Vicente Fernández (1940–2021) that features a variety of ranchera songs.
1 Comment on “Vicente Fernández – ¡Arriba Huentitán! album art”
Thanks, Javi. This is an interesting one, in terms of typographic production. You are spot on with Modern No. 20 as the main typeface. However, the capitals are not from Modern No. 20: the serifs are bracketed more. The designer sourced them from Baskerville Old Face – added.
The slightly irregular alignment in combination with the tight spacing, the lowered i dots, and the ill-positioned diacritics (which erroneously use the acento grave instead of the agudo) suggest that this was made with rub-down type. And indeed both Modern No. 20 and Baskerville Old Style were added to the Letraset library in 1972, the year this album was released.
The fact that most glyphs with round bottoms sit a tad too high is probably because the letters were aligned to a temporary guide line or a physical ruler, not taking into account the need for overshoots. Such a dancing baseline can only really occur when the letters are positioned individually, as in architectural signs – or in dry transfer lettering.
To understand how such a mix of different typefaces can happen, it’s helpful to know that in larger sizes, the character set of a Letraset typeface was spread across several sheets. For example, a full “font” in 72pt typically comprised two sheets: one for capitals and numerals, and a second one for the lowercase. Maybe the cover designer only had two sheets at hand – one with Modern No. 20’s lowercase, and one with Baskerville Old Style’s capitals – and decided the two are similar enough.
A Letraset sheet with 72pt Modern No. 20 (lowercase). Photo: hunting7on
A Letraset sheet with 72pt Baskerville Old Style (uppercase and numerals). Photo: hunting7on