Style combination · Pairs well
AfriCOBRA × Black Lives Matter Street Murals
AfriCOBRA's letter-built portraits and Kool-Aid colours are a ready model for filling each giant capital with Black portraiture and pattern; credit the artists and commission Black painters for the letters.
Mix them and make something AfriCOBRA Black Lives Matter Street Murals
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.
AfriCOBRA Black Lives Matter Street Murals
- Type from Black Lives Matter Street Murals
- Colour from AfriCOBRA
- Form from AfriCOBRA
- Composition from AfriCOBRA
- Surface from Black Lives Matter Street Murals
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Black Lives Matter Street Murals
Fiesta
Bungee, standing in for Outline capitals drafted in white by a sign painter for other artists to fill, each in their own style (Japhy Witte's layout for the Capitol Hill mural in Seattle, 2020, whose letter dimensions were taken from Charlotte's mural)
Text · AfriCOBRA
The Black Arts Movement collective founded in Chicago in 1968 by Jeff Donaldson, Wadsworth and Jae Jarrell, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Gerald Williams, after OBAC's Wall of Respect mural. Its principles call for free symmetry, 'mimesis at mid-point', visibility, 'shine' and 'Cool-ade' colour. Paintings and screenprints pack the surface with bright, high-keyed hues set edge to edge and stylised Black figures, with slogans such as UNITE or Black is Beautiful drawn into faces, hair and ground. Editions (100 of Unite, 300 of Jarrell's Revolutionary) carried it to Black viewers without art training.
Archivo; AfriCOBRA used Hand-drawn block capitals fractured into coloured shards behind the figures and Letter-built portraits
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from AfriCOBRA, with a counter-accent from Black Lives Matter Street Murals. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
AfriCOBRA Black Lives Matter Street Murals
-
#ffd400ground · 36% -
#151311ink · 14% -
#f7861caccent · 18% -
#c8202faccent · 14% -
#1e7b3caccent · 10% -
#5fbf3aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ffd400;
--ink: #151311;
--accent-1: #f7861c;
--accent-2: #c8202f;
--accent-3: #1e7b3c;
--accent-4: #5fbf3a;
--font-display: "Bungee", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
AfriCOBRA: AfriCOBRA is a self-defined Black aesthetic made by Black artists for Black communities; the collective still exists, its members and estates hold the copyrights, and the raised fist, the ankh, Yoruba orisha imagery and slogans like Nation Time carry political and spiritual meaning. Do not strip the Kool-Aid palette and letter-filled portraits into generic 'retro Black Power' branding: credit the artists, and commission Black artists for work addressed to Black audiences.
Black Lives Matter Street Murals: These murals answer police killings of real people, among them George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, are kept up by Black artists' collectives and community groups, and remain contested: Black Lives Matter DC called the D.C. mural a 'performative distraction from real policy changes', others were defaced with tyre marks, a swastika or 'All Lives Matter', and the D.C. original was dug up in 2025 under congressional pressure. Do not borrow the slogan, the road-yellow capitals or the letter-per-artist layout as decoration for a brand or a campaign that is not the movement's own; commission and pay Black artists and credit the painter of each letter (Seattle's transport department paid the collective about $3,000 per artist to repaint in 2020); and know that painting a road without a permit can break local law: in Florissant, Missouri, the city painted over activists' mural outside the police department again and again and police arrested two of them under an ordinance against street painting. Paintings made without the city are still part of the movement's own history, from Seattle's first mural, painted during the Capitol Hill occupation, to the Defund the Police slogans in Washington and Toronto.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With AfriCOBRA
- Chicano Screenprint Poster Pairs well · Movement screenprints of the same years, made in and for their own communities: Chicano posters set one emblematic figure on flat colour, often parodying American packaging; AfriCOBRA packs the figure into a lettered, many-coloured field and stays sincere. Pair them, as both pair with the Panthers, for coalition work.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Pop used screenprint, bright colour and slogans with ironic distance from consumer culture; AfriCOBRA used the same tools for sincere, positive messages to Black viewers, so decide which voice the colour speaks in.
- Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art Pairs well · Aaron Douglas's flat silhouettes are an earlier Black self-portrait in print; set his stepped light and profiles beside AfriCOBRA's lettered colour to trace the line from the New Negro to Black Power.
- Psychedelic Poster Contrasts · Psychedelic lettering melts until it can barely be read; AfriCOBRA also fills figures and grounds with letters, but keeps the slogan legible because the message comes first.
- Afrofuturist Design Contrasts · Both picture Black people with pride in saturated colour, but Afrofuturism goes to cosmic futures in jewel tones on black space; AfriCOBRA stays in the present-day neighbourhood, in daylight Cool-ade colour, with the slogan written into the figure.
With Black Lives Matter Street Murals
- Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Contrasts · Graffiti writers paint their own names on walls and trains, uninvited and in letters few outsiders can read; these murals lay one shared, legible slogan on the road, usually with the city's permission. Let a writer fill one letter, as Sam Sneke did in Seattle, without turning the slogan into a piece.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Contrasts · Both are brush-painted public lettering, and a sign artist laid out Seattle's letters, but sign-writing serves a shop at eye level with shaded, mixed alphabets, while these murals lie flat on the road as one unshaded slogan read from above. Borrow the layout skill, not the shading.
- Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Contrasts · Cairo's murals were painted against the state and erased by it; most Black Lives Matter street murals were painted with city permission, and many are maintained by cities or community groups, though the D.C. original was removed by its own city in 2025. Ask whose voice the paint speaks in before borrowing either.
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Contrasts · Both turn a movement's short slogan into public type, but Gran Fury printed posters, stickers and billboards in condensed sans over photographs, while these murals are painted once, on the street, by many hands and without photographs.