2/20/2024 0 Comments Grateful dead album covers fonts![]() ![]() Andy Warhol is often though to have designed the famous Rolling Stones "lips" logo, and on the internet one often finds attribution credited to John Pasch, but the real creator is longtime record album designer Ruby Mazur. Logo and band font design was sort of lost among larger discussions of album cover design - which also peaked in the 1970s - and even today the origins of many logos are shrouded in mystery and misinformation. ![]() Rock was entering its apotheosis of influence, its high-imperial hegemonic stage, and the big acts of the 1970s functioned, in a sense, like corporations, with managers and private jets and "shareholders" in the form of fans - so why not have a corporate logo, a band-brand identity? We can roughly bracket this period by two designs by the renowned Roger Dean: The "Yes" logo, at the beginning of the decade, trippily organic, still breathing in the fumes of the late 1960s and, roughly a decade later, the colder, more sci-fi like logo for the "supergroup" Asia, who themselves arguably represented the last gasp of 1970s arena rock. ![]() Is there a "Modest Mouse" font? An Arcade Fire logo? I openly admit that the real problem here may be that my own musical coming-of-age has long passed, but my difficulty at mentally conjuring up contemporary iconography leads me to wonder: Has heavy metal graphic design run its course? Is the band logo as a species dead? And is there much of a future for the graphic representation of popular music itself? Looking back, the extravagant logo and the instantly recognizable letterform seems a relic of the 1970s, akin to the massive arena rock show replete with pyrotechnics and garish props or the black concert jersey with white sleeves, dutifully declaring the band's roster of appearances at the Houston Astrodome or Topeka Civic Auditorium. Thinking back to some of those fonts and logos, it occurred to me not only that they seemed very much of the 1970s, but that I could not easily summon similar examples from contemporary music. This being prior to the Macintosh, I did not then have much of a working knowledge of typefaces, yet I was captivated by these outrageous letterforms - often adorned with a strangely bewitching umlaut - and carefully constructed logos, which seemed to somehow perfectly capture the essence, the entire being, of my heavy metal heroes. But what strikes me now is that those logos, whatever their originality or quality, represented one of my earliest engagements with graphic design (cereal box logos may have been the first). The logos and lettering tended to be campily Gothic (a procession of black letter fonts), enigmatically runic or otherworldly, all of which fit in well with my then worldview, heavy as it was on Dungeons and Dragons and the novels of H.P. Browsing recently through a collection of "band fonts," my memory drifted back to Middle School where I, plastic Bic in hand, would spend countless hours carefully inscribing the covers of my Mead notebooks with the logos and signature fonts of my favorite bands: the bewinged logos of Van Halen and Aerosmith, the Ace Frehley-designed all-caps "KISS" with its lightning-bolt "S" letters (that to some were too evocative of the Waffen SS), the Tolkienesque Led Zeppelin and the three-dimensional Judas Priest, the sort of blurred courier typeface logo for Cheap Trick, not to mention the Bob Defrin-designed "AC/DC" logo (with its "high voltage" slash).
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