Pandora.com played me a song from New Order’s Substance album. The album cover’s design struck me. So beautifully simple. It’s only black and white, no gray, certainly no colour, with one font delicately centered vertically and strongly centered on the horizontal plane. The single graphical element of a line ties everything together while providing a sense of order and symbolizing the word “substance” in a powerful manner.
In such a strikingly simple design, it’s a rather bold move to include the publishing year on the cover. It’s not part of the album name. This lends a timeless feel something akin to seeing Greek numerals in elegantly simple ancient temples. Bravo.
I did some digging and I’m going to take a rather educated guess that the font is Berthold Bodoni Light which comes from a great family. Coincidentally while I was listening to the song I was designing a book cover where I selected Bodoni Bold Condensed as the feature font.
This is how Bodoni is meant to be used.