Heaven 17 – Penthouse and Pavement album art
Contributed by Giles Booth on Nov 14th, 2017. Artwork published in
circa September 1981
.
License: All Rights Reserved.
Cover painting by Ray Smith
Trying to identify the fonts on this album is slowly driving me crazy, I’d really appreciate expert help! The album title is almost Bodoni Poster or Ultra Italic, but I’m not sure it’s quite either.
The Heaven 17 logo is even more of a puzzle to me. Its flat top to the number ‘1’ and thin horizontals on the ‘H’ and ‘E’ are highly distinctive — they remind me of Matthew Carter’s logo for Private Eye magazine — but I cannot find a font that matches.
License: All Rights Reserved.
7 Comments on “Heaven 17 – Penthouse and Pavement album art”
Hello Giles,
The bold italic Didone is Letraset’s Annlie. For the logo: I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the flat top in ‘1’ — that kind of detail can easily be modified, and it’s a customization that almost suggests itself in this context. More useful for an ID are the evenly weighted legs of ‘A’, and the diagonal in ‘N’ that is much thinner than the verticals. Headliners’ Matterhorn 2 comes close in this regard. It also has the right kind of ‘7’. Out of the box, it doesn’t seem to be a perfect match, though. London-based Photoscript had a related face named Matador, but I haven’t seen a full showing of it yet. Photolettering’s Consul Condensed is another pre-digital face in this style, but a rather unlikely candidate in this case. I wouldn’t rule out a customized Compacta either. For a digital approximation, see Chupada.
Here’s Matador, which is indeed very similar to Matterhorn, but has a lower crossbar on the ‘A’ as in this use. Could be a match!
And the flat top in ‘1’! Thank you, Stephen! That’s good enough for me, I have added Matador to the credits.
Matthew Carter’s logo for Private Eye was a full alphabet (never published, apparently), but it doesn’t have the dropped crossbar or Futura-stype 1 either. They have the same ampersand, though. I imagine that they’re both based on the same kind of ultra-condensed lettering model, as with Compacta? It’s very sixties.
Photoscript was owned by Robert Norton, who knew Carter—thirty years later he would work with him as an artistic director at Microsoft. I’ve always wanted to know a bit more about his early career and who he commissioned type designs from—this interview is with one advertising director he bought up a font from. I also believe he commissioned or drew the Microsoft Haettenschweiler face.
Thanks for the link, Blythwood!
Yes, Microsoft’s Haettenschweiler is a digital adaptation of Photoscript’s Haettenschweiler Extended. This style is shown together with Schmalfette Grotesk as Photoscript originals (marked with ©) in their 1968 List of Typefaces. Unlike Walter Haettenschweiler’s original Schmalfette Grotesk which was “released” as an alphabet in the source book Lettera 1 (1954), these phototype adaptations include a lowercase.
I suspect he wrote the Microsoft account of Haettenschweiler’s history-he did for many other Microsoft faces. If so, the fact that Haettenschweiler “never received a single cent” might explain why it doesn’t credit the person who drew the lower case, and why it doesn’t explicitly state that the Microsoft version is directly based on the Photoscript one.
I also believe Eraman is yet another Robert Norton company or something like that-Photoscript’s Westminster is also digitised with credit to it. I keep meaning to figure out who would know the answers to this kind of question…
Amazing work! Thank you. Fonts in Use contributors are the best. Matador it is, what a lovely font. Heaven 17 used Compacta elsewhere I think, a really evocative style of font.