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October 12, 2005
Summer of Love
It's been a Summer of Love in the sunny North West of England, give or take a rainy fortnight here and there. After having bought a copy of Gastaut and Criqui's book 'Off the Wall - Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco' from Fopp Records in July, we went to the Liverpool Tate Gallery a few weeks ago and saw their Summer of Love Exhibition. The best part was right at the start, a big room filled with those wonderful hippy posters by Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson, my favourite Victor Moscoso, and others, not forgetting the wonderful Martin Sharp here in England.
Apart from being stunned by the amazing colours of the original posters, I'd already begun to look closely at Victor Moscoso's letter forms and start work on a font inspired by the hugely exaggerated slab serifs on posters like his 'Horns of Plenty' featuring Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother & the Holding Company.
And so K-Type Bigfoot is born, Moscoso-inspired but with a completely new set of lower case letters that were pretty tricky to keep in character.
We've also started work on a beautifully blobby free version of Moscoso's Moby Grape 'Neptune's Notion' alphabet, so unless it turns out to be exactly the same as Walter Kafton-Minkel's 'Psychadelic', it might become a future K-Type Freebie. If you're really hungry for Hippydom, try our free version of 'Magical Mystery Tour' available for immediate download in regular and Outline Shadow versions.
We are also tempted to work on a font inspired by Rick Griffin's lettering. His classic style is available as 'Hendrix', which appears to be a caps only font by designer David Nalle, available from Scriptorium. I'm tempted to work from the same sources, but again to create a lower case that sits right.
And as the warm sunlight drives off along the M56 and October creeps wetly from behind its sunglasses, I wish you peace, love, harmony and a big bag of Maltesers.
Posted by keith at October 12, 2005 09:14 AM
Comments
Yeah, baby!
I too went to the Summer of Love exhibition at the Liverpool Tate and completely agree. The first room, the poster exhibition, really knocked me out and I still haven't quite got up off the floor yet.
So much so that I have spent more money than I should on buying some originals from www.sixtiesposters.com and from Victor Moscoso himself.
I saw these posters in magazines in the sixties but as air travel was infinitely more expensive then, I had never seen any of the posters for real. What a revelation! The colours, baby! The total vibe!
How great that they got proper exposure in a gallery last year. I remember as an art student in the sixties that a great many 'arty' types were really sniffy about them, even the graphic design guys. I knew they were wrong then and I know it now.
Why is it that an exhibition of 'ephemeral' graphics touched me more profoundly than any fine art exhibition I've been to in twenty years?
Answer, because it was part of my youth; because it was part of the most creative and exciting decade of the 20th century; because it was connected to the best pop music era of all time.
Just because it was.
Posted by: Fergus at February 6, 2006 10:10 PM