The Black Panther, Vol. 3, No. 4 (June 14, 1969)

Never has Dom carried so much weight as in this under-appreciated Emory Douglas cover for The Black Panther. The photo collage and all-caps Futura Condensed are classic Douglas moves, but “FASCISM” is set in type that is unusually large for his Black Panther designs. The choice of Dom was likely due to necessity, being the only style he happened to have at this size in a transfer sheet, but it works on an aesthetic level, imbuing a sense of social urgency to a typeface usually associated with advertising.

The brushiness of Dom’s origins are much more apparent in the Bold, and it takes on the appearance of being painted directly over the top of the image. This original Dom Bold is much less commonly seen than Casual (the regular weight), probably because it wasn’t as widely distributed in transfer and film formats and didn’t survive the transition to digital fonts, replaced in most versions (except URW’s) with a bold that has much less detail.

This copy of the newspaper is from Letterform Archive’s collection. You can read more about Emory Douglas and The Black Panther in an Archive article and a Fonts In Use post. For another example of a lighthearted advertising typeface used for serious social purposes, see the “Black Sisters Unite” pinback button.