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The arcane alphabets of Black Sabbath
To commemorate Ozzy Osbourne, we take a deep dive into the obscure sources for the titling designs on Black Sabbath’s early album covers.
This situation is not surprising when you consider those first four Sabbath covers were all designed using uncommon sources from the era of phototype and dry transfer lettering – a relatively short period after the peak of letterpress printing but before the digital revolution. The cover of Sabbath’s third album dropped photography entirely and went all-in on a text-only treatment, with large, bold, in-your-face, typography – twisted and warped as if being shaken by high-amplitude vibrations, or distorted by altered perception. Though there were plenty of heavy geometric sans-serif typefaces being used around that time with similar structural features, the style used for Vol 4 seems to be a primarily original design, and not a direct adaptation of some other existing face.
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