Warner/Reprise promo posters

By the mid-1970s, Warner/Reprise (the collective name for Warner Bros. Records, its main subsidiary Reprise, and the labels they distributed, such as Bearsville and Chrysalis) was one of the most successful companies in the music industry. To promote their artists, Warner released a distinctive series of posters to be displayed in American stores. Each poster featured a stark black-and-white photo of one of Warner’s best-selling acts, accompanied by the name of the singer or group in a distinctive, eye-catching font (which is the focus of the article), and the logo of the particular label they were signed to. We’re assuming the posters date from around 1973, since that’s when Procol Harum (one of the bands included in the campaign) made their first release on US Chrysalis, the Grand Hotel album.

The font used throughout the series is an extrabold Helvetica variant with so-called “biform” or “unicase” glyphs for the letters e a m n u: these have the lowercase form, but are just as tall as the uppercase letters. It’s unclear if a typeface with such features was readily available, or whether the posters use a custom creation based on Helvetica Black, with its lowercase letters scaled up to match the capital height.

The image below shows two words from the posters compared to a resetting with glyphs from Fette Helvetica (Helvetica Black) as cast in metal by the Stempel foundry in Germany. In order to approximate the poster type, the letters a e m and n were scaled up, and all letters were made a tad narrower. It’s not a perfect match, but if the letterforms started out with Helvetica – and many characteristic details, from the height of the terminals in e and s to the tail in a, suggest as much – then it obviously wasn’t the foundry version, but some malleable phototype adaptation thereof.

The designer of these posters is unknown. While it’s possible that Warner hired an outside advertising agency for this campaign, the posters may have been designed in-house, too: Warner had its own art and marketing department, known as Creative Services, whose personnel included such first-rate talents as Stan Cornyn and Ed Thrasher, both Grammy winners.

This article compiles all the known posters in the series as of publication. However, it’s likely that there are more of these posters out there, since several popular Warner/Reprise acts of the era are unrepresented. If you have a pic of another poster from this campaign, or know anything about their creation, please contact us.