"When I hear ‘The 70’s’, I reach for my gun…"
I picked up a 1974 Car & Driver at a vintage goods store a few years ago, and after thumbing through the pages, I wanted to put my head in an oven. Honestly, I have to thank my parents for letting me miss most of that godforsaken decade, beset as it was by Bookman Swash, brownness, and gas shortages.
Ah, but maybe things weren’t quite that bad. Gene Gable presents a tour of 70’s typography*, showing the ways that evolving technology enabled new type treatments. Check out part 2 for more horrific excellence.
In the vein of type treatments that cry out for a greasy bass line (or maybe an acid rock riff), peep these others I’ve stumbled across:
- Oscar Wilson; more here.
- Eduardo Recife [Via]
- The Tagtool blog ("Una noche de raw beats!")
- Wu-Tang Clan, as rendered for Scion
* Hey, is that the Photoshop family logo? >;-)
Ahh, I love the smell of Letraset in the morning…
Long live Bookman Swash!
check out wuforever.com
for latest wu-tang clan single off 8 diagrams, and more wu tang downloads (over 250 songs in mp3)
Thanks for the stroll through the groovy typography. It’s funny how you can know an era by the typography that came from it.
Also, great job on spelling the guitar lick (Bahw-tchika-WAhow). I had to look at that twice before I got it, but I couldn’t have done a better job.
[Heh–thanks. –J.]
By the way, why did you buy a 1974 Car & Driver magazine?
[I guess I was just floored by the extreme sh*ttiness of it all–the cars, the clothes, the ads, and what must have been the whole vibe in the country at the time. Can you imagine trying to write a car magazine during/after a gas crunch, when environmental regulations had totally emasculated nearly every ride?
The particular fascination for me was a cigarette ad featuring a particularly rugged bastard smoking in neck-deep water. The cigarette was noticably fake–superimposed via some ancestor-process to Photoshop. I couldn’t believe that such a crappy-looking image would make anyone say, “Hey, I want to be like *that* guy!” It would make me say, “Wake me up in 1987.” –J.]
Oh man. Awesome round-up! I survived the 70’s but like many things, didn’t realize how headache-inducing the designs were until years later.
Here’s one for you, a JC Penney’s catalog sample from 1975:
http://janceedunn.typepad.com/wwwjanceedunncom/2007/09/jc-penneys-19-1.html
Superfly fashions and hookahs, oh dear…