Thundercat Drunk

07/30/2018

Thundercat's 2017 album.Thundercat is an LA-based musician and bassist with a unique approach to music, updating 1970s psychedelic fusion and other music with a sampling sensibility. The artwork, inspired by Herbie Hancock's Death Wih from 1974, is done in Cooper Black to recreate the atmosphere of the 1970s. The title of the song is Franklin Gtothic, which also recreates the atmosphere of the era.

Typeface

Cooper Black is a very heavy version of Cooper Oldstyle (also known simply as Cooper), an innovative typeface with rounded serifs and long ascenders designed in 1919. The Cooper family was the work of Oswald Bruce Cooper, co-owner of the Bertsch & Cooper design firm in Chicago. Cooper Black was first released by the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry of Chicago in 1922. Oz Cooper was fond of saying that the Black fit the needs of “far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers.” Cooper Black set a trend in ad types which prompted such designers as Fred Goudy (one of Cooper’s early teachers) to follow suit with their own black faces (compare Goudy Heavyface).Cooper Black is based on traditional "old-style" serif lettering, rather than the hard-edged "fat face" fonts popular in the nineteenth century, giving it a soft, 'muddy' appearance, with relatively low contrast between thick and thin strokes.

Franklin Gothic was designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company in 1903-1912. Early types without serifs were known by the misnomer “gothic” in America (“grotesque” in Britain and “grotesk” in Germany).There were already many gothics in America in the early 1900s, but Benton was probably influenced by the popular German grotesks: Basic Commercial and Reform from D. Stempel AG. Franklin Gothic may have been named for Benjamin Franklin, though the design has no historical relationship to that famous early American printer and statesman.Franklin Gothic is still one of the most widely used sans serifs; it’s a suitable choice for newspapers, advertising and posters.