Style combination · Contrasts
Arts × Vorticism
BLAST refused 'a revival of lost folk art' and blasted the 'years 1837 to 1900'; set its hard black shards against a hand-printed floral page to stage machine against handicraft.
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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.
Arts & Crafts Movement Vorticism & BLAST Typography
- Type from Vorticism
- Colour from Vorticism
- Form from Arts
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Vorticism avoids abundant decoration and floral & vegetal: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Composition from Arts
- Surface from Arts
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The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Vorticism
Noise
Archivo Black; Vorticism used Grotesque No. 9 (Stephenson Blake), the heavy jobbing grotesque of most of BLAST's manifesto pages and Latin Bold for the boxed section numerals of the manifesto
Text · Arts
A British-led reform movement that answered industrial shoddiness with honest handcraft, medieval models and the ideal of joy in labour. In graphic design it is embodied by William Morris's Kelmscott Press: dark Jenson-derived and gothic types, handmade paper, and wood-engraved borders and initials dense with stylised foliage, treating the book as one integrated, hand-made object.
EB Garamond; Arts used Golden Type and Troy and Chaucer
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Vorticism, with a counter-accent from Arts. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Arts & Crafts Movement Vorticism & BLAST Typography
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#efe9dcground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#e8b62caccent · 18% -
#a33224accent · 14% -
#e2388faccent · 10% -
#c39a4aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe9dc;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #e8b62c;
--accent-2: #a33224;
--accent-3: #e2388f;
--accent-4: #c39a4a;
--font-display: "Archivo Black", sans-serif;
--font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}04
The two styles
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More combinations
With Arts
- Flat Design Contrasts · Borrow one engraved border or initial to give a flat interface a crafted, editorial moment against its vector minimalism.
- Scandinavian Functionalism Pairs well · Keep the craft ethic and natural palette but reduce Morris's foliage to a single repeating motif for warmth without clutter.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Frame a two-ink riso print with a Morris-style vine border to give indie publishing an heirloom, hand-made gravity.
- Die Neue Typographie Contrasts · Tschichold's asymmetric, unornamented page was built against this centred, bordered book; set them side by side to argue tradition versus machine age.
- Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Pairs well · Morris's Kelmscott Press revived gothic type (Troy and Chaucer) inside dense woodcut borders; join the broken letter to foliate frames and handmade paper for a medieval, hand-made book.
- Renaissance Book Typography Pairs well · Morris's Kelmscott Press revived Jenson's roman; pair a Renaissance text block with dense Arts & Crafts borders for a private-press feel.
- Josef Frank and Svenskt Tenn Botanical Prints Pairs well · The parent tradition: both fill a repeat with plants on linen, but Morris is symmetrical, earthy and dense with dark grounds, Frank is looser, brighter and mostly light. Pair a Morris-style framed book page with Frank-style endpapers.
- Italian Futurism Contrasts · Arts & Crafts handwork is everything Futurism wanted to burn; juxtapose them to stage machine against hand.
With Vorticism
- London Transport Design Pairs well · Set a Vorticist field of angular planes under calm, evenly spaced lettering for a poster that has machine-age energy but still reads as a public service.
- Italian Futurism Contrasts · Its parent scatters words in freedom along curves and diagonals; Vorticism keeps the same shouting sizes on level, stacked lines, so decide whether the page should explode or stand like a wall.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Use BLAST's blast-and-bless lists, vertical rules and boxed numbers as the skeleton of a manifesto zine, then photocopy it so the heavy caps fill in and roughen.
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Both shout in bold grotesque capitals with heavy rules; add Constructivist photomontage and a red second ink when a Vorticist page has to sell one clear message rather than a list of quarrels.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Pairs well · Wadsworth's dazzle camouflage came back on OMD's Dazzle Ships sleeve (1983): print the angular dazzle bands behind a die-cut or panelled sleeve and keep the type in small, spaced grotesque capitals.
- Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22) Contrasts · Both set heavy jobbing grotesque with thick rules and bars in a little magazine, BLAST in 1914 and Klaxon in 1922; BLAST shouts lists beside machine abstractions, Klaxon keeps one quiet cover forme, jokes about the sonnet trade and draws figures in contour.