Stylogeny combining Afrobeat Sleeve Art × Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism

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Style combination · Contrasts

Afrobeat Sleeve Art × Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism

The same twelve-inch square used two ways: Lemi Ghariokwu packs it with painted, captioned satire, Reid Miles empties it to one photograph, one colour and one giant word.

From the research on Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism

Mix them and make something Afrobeat Sleeve Art Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism

WOWAfrobeat Sleeve Art × Blue Note1974 · 1956
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Afrobeat Sleeve Art, their arrangement from Afrobeat Sleeve Art, the finish from Afrobeat Sleeve Art. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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.

Afrobeat Sleeve Art Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism

Type from Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism
Colour from Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism
Form from Afrobeat Sleeve Art
Composition from Afrobeat Sleeve Art
Surface from Afrobeat Sleeve Art

02

The type

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

Display · Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism

Wow

Archivo, standing in for Trade Gothic and Trade Gothic Extended (Dexter Gordon, Go; Herbie Hancock, Takin' Off; Kenny Burrell, Midnight Blue)

Text · Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism

The record-sleeve language of Blue Note Records, set by art director Reid Miles, who designed some 350 twelve-inch LP covers between about 1956 and 1967, often around Francis Wolff's session photographs. With what Miles called 'one or two colors to work with', he tinted and cropped black-and-white photographs, ran flat bands of colour, and set titles huge in grotesques, slabs and fat faces that are stacked, squeezed, repeated or cut off by the edge. It made mid-century American modernism a serial system of photograph and type for one square format.

Archivo; Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism used Trade Gothic and Trade Gothic Extended and Ultra Bodoni

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism, with a counter-accent from Afrobeat Sleeve Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Afrobeat Sleeve Art Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism

  • #f3efe2 ground · 36%
  • #0d0d0d ink · 14%
  • #e4532a accent · 18%
  • #d19a39 accent · 14%
  • #2a5caa accent · 10%
  • #56a5e4 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f3efe2;
  --ink: #0d0d0d;
  --accent-1: #e4532a;
  --accent-2: #d19a39;
  --accent-3: #2a5caa;
  --accent-4: #56a5e4;
  --font-display: "Archivo", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism: The covers, Wolff's photographs, the Blue Note name and its oval logo are still owned and reissued by the label. Borrow the system (one tint, a hard crop, one giant word), never a particular sleeve, the label's logo or its catalogue-number line, and never present a new design as a Blue Note release. The photographs record named Black musicians at work: photograph or license your own named subject, or crop to an instrument, hands or an object, rather than inventing a generic Black jazz musician as period decor for 'cool'. Do not copy the generic 'tribal' pictograms of Afro-Cuban (1957) as shorthand for music of the African diaspora.

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The two styles

A distressed, brightly coloured two-panel collage titled “PEOPLE RiSiNG” features a large saxophonist surrounded by drummers, dancers, crowds, soldiers and yellow buses. The right panel contrasts industrial smokestacks, a laughing suited man holding money, and skeletons in flames with a child crouching in polluted water and people celebrating below. 1974–present · Sub-Saharan Africa Afrobeat Sleeve Art The painted and collaged record covers of Nigerian Afrobeat, defined by Lemi Ghariokwu's sleeves for Fela Kuti from Alagbon Close (1974) onward. Each cover is a political cartoon that illustrates the album's lyrics, packing oil paint, cut-out photographs, speech balloons and caricatured soldiers and world leaders into a crowded, saturated 12-inch frame under a newly drawn title. Oversized condensed lettering reads “DEEP HORN” in black and blue on a cream background. A tightly cropped, blue-and-black portrait of a man playing a trumpet fills the right side, with the instrument’s bell extending across the lower foreground. 1956–1967 · North America Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism The record-sleeve language of Blue Note Records, set by art director Reid Miles, who designed some 350 twelve-inch LP covers between about 1956 and 1967, often around Francis Wolff's session photographs. With what Miles called 'one or two colors to work with', he tinted and cropped black-and-white photographs, ran flat bands of colour, and set titles huge in grotesques, slabs and fat faces that are stacked, squeezed, repeated or cut off by the edge. It made mid-century American modernism a serial system of photograph and type for one square format.

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