But what pulled me into this site was its rather humbling collection of album cover and record label designs, which make up the entire user interface for listening to the audio tracks. Clicking on 45, for example, in the top navigation bar reveals an ever-expanding page displaying small-ish images of 45 label scans, each a link to their respective audio recording. I wish there were larger images available for us lovers of visual junk, but that’s just me wanting more of an already good thing. Spread the good word,  Bap-Tizum.com is an inspired feast for the eyes and ears.

As an all-around lover of type my first reaction to seeing “distressed” typography is to check if the designer simply tapped-out the letters in a distressed font or if they set the type in a non-distressed font and then, after getting the kerning and such just right, added said distressing. Why this matters is hopefully obvious at first glance of the word RADIOHEAD. It’s bad enough when the same distressed character is repeated in close proximity, but when you have a pair of these characters, such as the “AD” in RADIOHEAD you might as well circle them with a red pen. This pitfall doesn’t just affect distressed typefaces. Any stylized type that is supposed to have a natural, unrefined look—scripts and handwriting fonts, for example—often suffer the same fate when just tapped-out.

I don’t know who the designer of this piece is nor do I mean them any disrespect. I’ve heard the spark of genius last just a nanosecond, but, honestly, here’s all of about ten minutes of work. And don’t get me started on the copy-and-pasted-and-horizontally-flipped tree artwork on either side. Many OpenType font families these days come with contextual ligatures and similar “awarenesses” that can automatically substitute alternates of the same character for creating variation and, if there ever was a case for using one, it’s right here. Even if the font doesn’t contain such features, how much work would it have been to set the nine letters in R-A-D-I-O-H-E-A-D and then apply a layer mask to distribute the distressing randomly across the whole word?

Any other band and I wouldn’t have noticed. But Radiohead have raised the bar for themselves with each successive release that to see such lackadaisical artwork is a bit of a knock against them as a band. For me at least. I know this might sound a bit harsh, like a pass/fail test. No, I’m not that disappointed with them. I still really like them and their music. Nevertheless, it feels like something important—the band’s visual identity—that appears more like a mock-up than a finished piece…and was missed by everyone.