An independent archive of typography.
Topics
Formats
Typefaces

Cassius logo and album art (1999)

Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Jun 20th, 2019. Artwork published in .
1999 album
Source: www.decks.de Decks.de. License: All Rights Reserved.

1999 album

The logo by French electronic music duo Cassius uses tightly spaced ITC Avant Garde Gothic, complete with its trademark ligatures for CA (see also Can, Canton, or Caro) and SS. The wordmark was already used on their very first release, “Foxxy”, from 1996. The images included here show the covers of the debut album 1999 and the break-through singles “Cassius 1999” and “Feeling For You”, all released in 1999. The album artwork is credited to Alexandre Courtès who is best known as director of music videos, including the clip for “Cassius 1999”. Avant Garde Gothic is also used for titles, track lists, and most other typography on the sleeves and record labels.

Cassius consists of Philippe Zdar and Boom Bass. On 19 June 2019, Zdar died aged 52 years, two days before the release of the album Dreems. RIP.

“Cassius 1999” 12″
Source: www.flickr.com Deezer. License: All Rights Reserved.

“Cassius 1999” 12″

“Feeling For You” 12″
Source: www.ebay.com tedsmeds. License: All Rights Reserved.

“Feeling For You” 12″

“Feeling For You” 12″ alternative/promo sleeve
Source: www.ebay.com bitsnbobs2k13. License: All Rights Reserved.

“Feeling For You” 12″ alternative/promo sleeve

Typefaces

  • ITC Avant Garde Gothic

Formats

Topics

Designers/Agencies

Artwork location

3 Comments on “Cassius logo and album art (1999)”

  1. Dating from 1996, were the ligatures redrawn from a specimen? When was the first digital version of Avant Garde to contain ligatures released?

  2. Hi J.D.,

    FontBook Vol. 1 from 1993 shows a digital version of Avant Garde Gothic with these ligatures and some (but not all) other alternates and extras, in five weights, with a Scangraphic Mannesmann credit. It was difficult to obtain this version for a while around 2000. Since 2004, a version that is based on Scangraphic’s is sold by Elsner+Flake.

    In 2005, ITC released their own digital Avant Garde Gothic Pro which has all the original extras and more, but suffers from optically uncorrected obliques. See also Stephen’s FontList.

    Side note: When ITC AGG Pro version came out, typophiles expressed their hope that corrected obliques will follow eventually. This didn’t happen. Quite ironically, MyFonts and Monotype explicitly credit André Gürtler, Erich Gschwind, and Christian Mengelt (Team’77) for drawing the obliques and list them as designers on their pages for ITC AGG Pro. The contribution of the Swiss designers has been discarded, though.

  3. Really cool designs—thanks for posting these!

Post a comment