Wiatraki – 1 album art
First and only album by the short-lived Polish pop rock band Wiatraki (“Windmills”), founded by Ryszard Poznakowski. Wiatraki 1 was released in 1970 by Polskie Nagrania Muza.
I admit, this is a bit of a stretch: Sea weed originally wasn’t a typeface in the narrow sense, but rather an alphabet reproduced in a lettering source book. Second, unlike the album art for the OFF compilation, this isn’t a use directly derived from the showing in Lettera 2. Still, it’s obvious that Maria Spychalska based her design on the letterforms drawn by Armin Haab. Not a font in use, but an alphabet design in indirect use, so to speak (see our tag “lettering derived from typeface”). Sea weed is mighty cool and quite rare, that’s why I decided it’s OK to make an exception and post this weird album cover.
Spychalska’s interpretation does without the one-sided flare serifs of Haab’s design. The version on the back cover (shown below) looks like a preliminary practice: There, the constructed skeleton letters are outlined, and hence less conjoined with the leaves. In the improved version on the front cover, the designer seized the benefits of lettering over type, and adjusted the length of the weed contextually: The gaps between W and I, A and T, etc. were minimized.
1 Comment on “Wiatraki – 1 album art”
Maria Spychalska must have been quite fond of Sea weed. She used the leafy letterforms for the cover design of another record, too, Skąd My Się Znamy by Wiślanie 69, also from 1970. Note the foliate ogonek in “SKĄD”! Here Sea weed is combined with hand-rendered interpretations of Roberta and Arnold Böcklin.