“Holocaust" Video Disc Movie Cover 

This image is a book cover and movie cover/poster for Gerald Green's RCA SelectaVision Video Disc "Holocaust," for which he also wrote the teleplay for the 1978 NBC miniseries. It was released for the first time in 1978. The novel tells the epic story of a Jewish family's struggle for survival during WWII and the Holocaust. The novel attempts to humanize the terrible event by putting faces to real-life tragedies and telling the story of two German families whose paths cross.

The Holocaust miniseries is a four-part television miniseries that explores the Holocaust from the perspectives of the fictional Weiss family, a family of Jews in Germany, and the perspective of a rising member of the SS, who gradually becomes a war criminal. The miniseries spans the period from 1938 to 1945 and covers the unfolding of this genocide, including events such as Kristallnacht to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the Sobibor death camp revolt. It was nominated for the 16  Emmy Awards and although I was unable to track down any specific information about the designer of the movie cover, I can say that the 1970s were a time of many social movements and cultural trends that had a significant impact on graphic design. Through music, fashion, and art, people sought to express themselves as extravagantly as possible. Only a few of the movements that helped define this legendary decade and have an impact on the visual world are the punk, disco, and hippy movements.

During this time, the following graphic design trends and movements also  gained popularity: Retro Fonts, Text Effects, Swashes, Groovy Fonts, Casual Script Fonts. Retro fonts were very popular at the time. Text effects were also widely used. Swashes were used frequently in fonts from the 1970s and hand-drawn groovy fonts replaced illustration. Less formal fonts were used in advertising throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including informal 70s script fonts.