Best of the Great Songs of Christmas album art
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “davisonartnouveau”. License: All Rights Reserved.
This compilation of Christmas songs was produced by Columbia Special Products in 1970 as a promotional record for Goodyear, featuring artists like Mahalia Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Petula Clark, Tony Bennett, and Doris Day.
5 Comments on “Best of the Great Songs of Christmas album art”
The title is rendered in what looks like a bolder weight of Davison Art Nouveau, with close shade. To my knowledge, Dave Davison’s design came in a single weight only. Photo-Lettering, Inc. didn’t list a second weight in their 1971 catalog. I would therefore assume we’re looking at custom lettering, based on Art Nouveau.
Below is a resetting using Sandana, a digitization and expansion of Dave Davison’s 1967 design. Quinn Davis recently made an alpha version available free of charge. It’s compiled from limited specimens and in-use examples, with many swash alternates and an added lowercase.
Thank you Florian! My revival being featured on Fonts in Use is the greatest Christmas gift I could ever get. If migrating the files from FontLab to Glyphs goes over well, I’ll see about mocking up some glyphs with the swashes from this lettering into it.
Also about the license, since I technically don’t own the original design, I decided to just make it free with attribution to Davison Art Nouveau if possible. I’ll save the old license for my original fonts.
You’re welcome, Quinn. I have adjusted the licensing info on our typeface page and in my previous comment.
That F is indeed intriguing. I haven’t spotted it in any direct uses of Art Nouveau. This doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, of course. But maybe the lettering artist followed the related E with the hook-like middle serif (which you already included in Sandana).
I think I have a workable F for this. It is based on the E with the downward swirl that can be seen on the Herbie Mann album cover. The A in Christmas comes from the final “swashbuckling” A in the type sample.