Journal

Scale, weight, rhythm and spacing can announce a genre, construct an artist’s personality and make an unfamiliar record feel immediately recognisable. This opening note looks at typography not as decoration, but as one of music’s first voices.

Brat’s importance lies less in its apparent anti-design than in its structure: a simple, recognisable and reproducible principle that invited an audience to become part of the identity.

From strict modernist systems to distorted display lettering, these sleeves show how words can occupy the entire visual field. Letterforms stop explaining the artwork and become the artwork themselves.