Style combination · Pairs well
Adinkra × Ghanaian Funeral Poster
A multicoloured strip border like kente's already frames some funeral banners; frame a portrait with a woven-strip border or a single adinkra sign whose proverb suits a death, learning its meaning first and keeping sacred signs out of trivial use.
01
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.
Adinkra & Kente Symbol Systems Ghanaian Funeral Poster & Banner
- Type from Ghanaian Funeral Poster
- Colour from Adinkra
- Form from Adinkra
- Composition from Ghanaian Funeral Poster
- Surface from Adinkra
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Ghanaian Funeral Poster
Together
Archivo Black, standing in for Connected script for first names and titles (a first name or a title with initials) over the surname in heavy sans-serif capitals, often outlined and set in white, red, navy or yellow
Text · Adinkra
The Akan textile languages of Ghana. In adinkra, named symbols carrying proverbs (Gye Nyame, Sankofa, Dwennimmen) are stamped in black with carved calabash stamps on cloth ruled into squares; kente is narrow-strip cloth woven in named warp-faced blocks of gold, green, red and blue and sewn into checkerboards. Pattern is a vocabulary: each motif and colour is chosen for its meaning.
Archivo; Adinkra used Adinkra stamped glyphs as a pictographic set and Ghanaian hand-painted sign lettering for accompanying text
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Adinkra, with a counter-accent from Ghanaian Funeral Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Adinkra & Kente Symbol Systems Ghanaian Funeral Poster & Banner
-
#efe2c4ground · 36% -
#151412ink · 14% -
#e3a51caccent · 18% -
#c3161caccent · 14% -
#7d3a1faccent · 10% -
#1d7a3caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe2c4;
--ink: #151412;
--accent-1: #e3a51c;
--accent-2: #c3161c;
--accent-3: #7d3a1f;
--accent-4: #1d7a3c;
--font-display: "Archivo Black", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Adinkra & Kente Symbol Systems: Adinkra symbols and kente patterns are named, proverb-bearing Akan heritage, and some kente designs were historically reserved for the Asantehene and royal lineages. Learn each symbol's meaning before use, keep sacred signs such as Gye Nyame out of trivial or demeaning contexts, and commission or credit Ghanaian stampers and weavers (for example in Ntonso and Bonwire) rather than printing faux kente.
Ghanaian Funeral Poster & Banner: These posters and banners show real, recently dead people and name their living relatives, and families pay for them as part of a funeral the community judges closely. Funeral posters are usually made for Christians and followers of traditional African religions (Adotey 2018), so do not present them as the funeral custom of all Ghanaians. Do not lift a real poster's photograph, names or lists into new work, and do not use the headlines and colour code as a gag or a generic 'African' texture: 'What a Shock' and a red ground mark a death as sudden or untimely, and relatives often find a banner on their own house painful to live with. The ranked lists of chief mourners can also carry live disputes over kinship and chieftaincy, as when the Tefle Traditional Council formally protested in 2009 against its omission from the poster of a Sokpoe paramount chief. Commission and credit Ghanaian designers and print shops for work in this idiom.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Adinkra
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · A modular grid holds adinkra squares naturally; pair them with a neutral grotesque for contemporary Ghanaian institutional work.
- Bògòlanfini Mud Cloth Pairs well · Adinkra stamps dark signs on light cloth while bògòlan leaves light signs in a dark mud-dyed ground; use the reversal for a light and dark pattern pair, with each motif's meaning and makers credited.
- Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics Contrasts · Saturated, meaning-dense repetition versus quiet emptiness: decide whether your message needs abundance or a single sign.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Treat adinkra as a consistent icon family on a strict grid, as Isotype did with pictograms, for wayfinding or data with local voice.
- Afrofuturist Design Pairs well · Afrofuturist identities draw on adinkra; render named symbols as glowing or metallic glyphs while keeping their meanings intact.
- Amazigh Sign System & Tifinagh Contrasts · Both are sign systems that carry meaning, but adinkra stamps named symbols into a ruled grid of squares. Amazigh weavers and tattooists vary the size and spacing of their signs by hand within bands and lattices, and share them with a script.
- Andean Woven Graphic Systems Contrasts · Adinkra stamps named symbols into ruled squares and kente joins woven strips, whereas Andean cells are woven into one garment and distorted toward its edges; keep the two languages distinct.
- Pacific Barkcloth (Tapa) Design Pairs well · Both are gridded ceremonial cloths of named motifs; borrow their shared square-by-square logic for a layout, while keeping each motif tied to its own culture and meaning.
With Ghanaian Funeral Poster
- Ghanaian Movie Poster Contrasts · They share the walls of Ghanaian towns, but the movie poster is painted by hand on flour sacks with invented, lurid scenes, while the funeral poster is typeset on a computer around a real photograph; set one painted, exaggerated figure against a funeral poster's sober portrait for a deliberate clash of registers.
- Lebanese Civil War Party Poster Contrasts · Both are public obituaries pasted on walls, with a straight photograph of the dead, the name and the dates, but a martyr poster is issued in series by a party under its emblem and slogans to claim a quarter, while a Ghanaian funeral poster is commissioned by one family to invite mourners and rank its kin; take the portrait-and-header format without the partisan voice.
- African Wax & Fancy Print Pairs well · Bredenbröker lists commemorative T-shirts, mugs and handkerchiefs beside the posters and banners as popular items that commemorate the dead in public, and wax print's one-sided fancy prints already serve as commemorative cloth with portraits; pair a funeral poster's photograph, name and age badge with a fancy-print repeat for a commemorative textile, keeping real people's faces and names out of new work.
- South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi) Pairs well · Both work in the street-level commercial vernacular of outlined lettering, badges and many typefaces at once, but Ijusi collages township signage as a designer's quotation while the funeral poster is that vernacular in use; pair the funeral poster's photographic portrait and ranked lists with Ijusi's collage for a layered, local announcement.