Style combination · Contrasts

ACT UP × Post-Binary Typography

Both are queer activist graphics, but Gran Fury borrowed advertising's photographs and slogans and kept standard letters (Futura, Gill Sans), while post-binary type leaves the picture ordinary and changes the alphabet. Choose Gran Fury for a public accusation, post-binary glyphs when the words themselves must include everyone.

From the research on Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)

Mix them and make something ACT UP Post-Binary Typography

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from ACT UP, their arrangement from ACT UP, the finish from ACT UP. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)

Type from Post-Binary Typography: Experimental & distorted
Eclectic mixing

ACT UP avoids experimental & distorted: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Colour from Post-Binary Typography: Limited spot colours
Gradients
Form from ACT UP: Naturalistic depiction
Geometric primitives
Composition from ACT UP: Layered information
Isolated object
Surface from ACT UP: Photocopy & distress
Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Post-Binary Typography

Noise

Jost, standing in for BBB Poppins TN (Eugénie Bidaut and Camille Circlude, 2022), after Jonny Pinhorn's Poppins

Text · ACT UP

The graphics of New York's AIDS activist movement: the SILENCE=DEATH poster of 1987, a pink triangle above white capitals on black, and the posters, stickers, T-shirts, billboards and bus ads of Gran Fury (1988–1995), ACT UP's 'unofficial propaganda ministry'. Professional offset print and the language of Madison Avenue (staged photographs, one-line slogans, facts in small print) were placed where advertising goes, to accuse government, church, press and drug companies of letting people with AIDS die.

Fira Sans; ACT UP used Gill Sans Bold Extra Condensed in white capitals reversed out of black for SILENCE=DEATH (1987), settled on after months in which the collective 'argued about issues, images and fonts' and Futura Extra Bold, Extra Bold Oblique and Extra Bold Condensed in black or white

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Post-Binary Typography, with a counter-accent from ACT UP. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)

#f6f3ee ground · 36%
#151515 ink · 14%
#d42a7f accent · 18%
#c8102e accent · 14%
#ee5d63 accent · 10%
#f06ea9 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f6f3ee;
  --ink: #151515;
  --accent-1: #d42a7f;
  --accent-2: #c8102e;
  --accent-3: #ee5d63;
  --accent-4: #f06ea9;
  --font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics: These are the graphics of a movement of gay men, lesbians and people with AIDS who were burying their friends, and many of their makers and subjects are living or died of AIDS (Mark Simpson, who appears in Kissing Doesn't Kill, died in 1996; Oliver Johnston in 1990); HIV remains a global health issue and ACT UP is still active. The pink triangle recalls the homosexual prisoners of the Nazi camps and was turned to point up as 'a disavowal of victimhood' (in Finkelstein's account; the Henry Ford's history says the inversion began as a mistake that the collective kept): do not use it, the SILENCE=DEATH equation or the kissing couples as decoration, Pride merchandise or brand campaigns, since the style was made to turn advertising against corporate greed, and do not picture people with HIV as victims or as a threat. SILENCE=DEATH is © 1987 The Silence = Death Project, which lent it to ACT UP (the poster reads 'Used by permission by ACT-UP'); Gran Fury's website declares its own artwork public domain, but the photographed people and quoted brands are not: write your own slogan and stage your own photograph, and never present a generated image as a period work.

Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type): This is the living practice of a queer, trans and non-binary community and of named designers, most of them active: do not use the glyphs as decorative 'Pride' texture or for brand campaigns that ignore the people they were made for; follow the CUTE that comes with the fonts: credit and link the designers, keep the files complete, give on its sliding scale (€300 to €1,000 for a cultural institution) and respect its answer to companies that want an inclusive image to pinkwash: 'Look elsewhere'; and never attribute a generated poster or font to the collective or prompt an image model with its members' names. Image models invent fake ligatures and misspell French, so set real inclusive words in the actual fonts and have them checked by people who use them. Type the median-dot forms and let the OpenType features display the glyphs, rather than pasting QUNI's Private Use Area characters, which screen readers cannot voice meaningfully and which turn into blanks or wrong signs when copied or shown in another font. In France, inclusive writing with the point médian is proscribed in schools by circular (2021) and a Senate bill sought to ban it more widely (2023), so check before setting official French public documents this way.