Journal Entry 3: Propagandhi's typographic treatment

Propagandhi is a band that makes self-styled "progressive thrash" music. They've been rocking since about '86. Throughout their 20+ years of existence, their sound and album cover quality have developed and matured quite a bit. In this post I will be examining there three most recent album treatments.

The first is their 2001 release Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes.

As you can see this title uses a bold slab serif font, that has been distressed. The same font is used both for the band and album name.

Next up is their 2005 release Potemkin City Limits.

For this album they went to a stencil and san serif combo. It's a little bit less distressed for the most part. And there is more stroke contrast between the band name and album title.

The third example is their 2009 offering Supporting Caste.

This was quite a change. Much cleaner. An elegant serif typeface, mixed with a fancy italic (almost script) font.

Looking at all of their album title's and merchandise, they must have at least 10 variations. This seems to go against all of the principles of branding. Some bands will always have the same word mark (some use letter marks, and symbol marks, but I will disregard those for now) for all of their albums and merchandise. I think it may be a genre thing, metal bands and 70s/80s bands like Boston and Chicago seem to stick with the same word mark for all of their albums and collateral. In any case it doesn't seem to be hurting them.

We talked about hierarchy for the book project in regards to the title, and author's name. Usually the book title has more emphasis, except in certain cases where they are trying to sell a book by a popular author. On every album I have looked at, the band name has emphasis. Ultimately this makes sense, it was just another interesting dissimilarity I noticed.

The typefaces that were chosen fit well with the music, if that makes sense. Today's Empires and Potemkin City Limits are both rougher. I don't mean rougher in recording quality, they are all recorded well, but more furious and more in your face. While Supporting Caste is more refined. It rocks just as hard (if not more so), is just as loud and is just as impassioned, but the music and lyrics are over all classier, along with the type treatment.