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.

The images immediately brought back a vivid memory from my childhood: my mom and dad sitting up in bed one lazy Sunday morning each having a leisurely read–mom with a check-out aisle, crafting mag and dad with a Playboy. No, I did not grow up in a hippie commune or a swinger household devoid of morals. But, my parents–both naturalized citizens–were probably feeling out the recent relaxing of tightly wound, nuclear family values of the previous few decades and, well, Playboy magazine must have seemed like a rather innocuous part of the discovery process.

This was circa 1971-or-2 and a man was definitely still a MAN. But things were changing rapidly and, as women were becoming increasingly independent, self-reliant and gaining control over their reproductive destinies, the sexual ideal of a woman was apparently also in need of an upgrade.

I remember dad’s magazine being about three or four times the thickness of mom’s, yet staple-bound nonetheless as if in defiance of the laws of physics. I mention this because my memory is that my dad was actually reading his magazine, where my mom seemed to be flipping through the pages of hers–something that now seems quite ironic now. His expression and demeanor revealed nothing of the magazine’s lurid contents and seemed more appropriate for a Popular Mechanics or perhaps Business Week.

Well, Playboy certainly was “thinking man’s porn” and, at least for a few decades, its issues boasted a higher proportion of emerging artists and writers than “Girls of the Big Ten.” Still, none of those words and images would have been possible without those “bunnies” baring it all, or at least most of it. And, while those pictorials seem rather tame compared to today’s internet porn,  I don’t doubt that their net effect was the same any way you slice it.