Post #134057 by tiki mick 1 on Wed, Jan 5, 2005 3:48 PM

When I first joined this forum, I started a post asking for historical info on the various Fonts used during the golden age of Tiki...

The post was almost immediately locked by Basement Kahuna, and others seemed to be pretty pissed off that I dared to ask anything about Fonts..

oh sure, a few people directed me to expensive fonts sales companies that charge 40 bucks for a computer disc, but buying fonts was never what I was really looking to do...I just wanted info, where they got the names, who designed them, etc...

well, for anyone that may be interested, I came up with some information on the "flora dora NT" font that was used on so many album covers, hotels and carwashes while searching today...

This is a little blurb about an outstanding artists of the 50's/60's named Jim Flora: (and yes, on my original post last year, NO ONE directed me to any posts that concerned this guy, and not knowing his name, or that he even existed, did not know what to search for)

Anyway, for anyone not easily offended by fonts, this is an interesting little piece of info (and the guy has a great website WWW. JIMFLORA.com that shows examples of his art..and it is clearly a SHAG influence, IMHO:

James (Jim) Flora concocted dozens of diabolic and hallucinatory album cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists, in the 1940s and ‘50s. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. Yet Flora's wondrous, childlike exuberance was subverted by a sinister tinge of the grotesque. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. He also took liberties with human anatomy, evoking bonded bodies, mutant appendages, ghoulish skin tints, and misshapen heads. He was not averse to pigmenting Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa like bedspread patterns.