Stylogeny combining Fante Asafo Flags × Guna Mola

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Style combination · Contrasts

Fante Asafo Flags × Guna Mola

Both are hand-cut cotton appliqué in saturated colour that absorbs foreign images, but a mola packs every gap with slits and echoing contour bands, while an asafo flag leaves a plain ground around a few silhouettes so the scene reads from across a street.

From the research on Fante Asafo Flags (Frankaa)

Mix them and make something Fante Asafo Flags Guna Mola

TogetherTogetherFante Asafo Flags × Guna Mola1850 · 1900
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Guna Mola, their arrangement from Guna Mola, the finish from Guna Mola. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Fante Asafo Flags (Frankaa) Guna Mola

Type from Fante Asafo Flags
Colour from Fante Asafo Flags
Form from Guna Mola
Composition from Guna Mola
Surface from Guna Mola

02

The type

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

Display · Fante Asafo Flags

Together

Londrina Solid; Fante Asafo Flags used Embroidered block capitals and numerals naming the company and Company numbers such as 'Nº1' and 'Nº2' in a contrasting cloth or thread, set in the field or along an arm of a large cross that divides the field ('NºI' in red on the bottom arm of a wide golden-yellow cross, Flags of the World 'Crocodiles and moon' flag)

Text · Guna Mola

The reverse-appliqué blouse panels of Guna women in Panama, made by cutting through two to seven stacked layers of cotton so that every shape is ringed by echoing bands of the colours beneath. Fields are packed with filler slits, sawtooth edges and mazes. The imagery runs from abstract ancestral designs and animals to Bible stories, cartoon characters, brand logos and party slogans, all redrawn in the same contour-echo idiom.

Archivo; Guna Mola used Letters cut through the cloth layers and outlined by echo bands, as in political and lettered mola panels and Brand wordmarks and cartoon lettering redrawn in reverse appliqué

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Fante Asafo Flags, with a counter-accent from Guna Mola. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Fante Asafo Flags (Frankaa) Guna Mola

  • #f0e9d8 ground · 36%
  • #1b1b1b ink · 14%
  • #f2b31b accent · 18%
  • #ee7a1f accent · 14%
  • #c62a2f accent · 10%
  • #1e3a8a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0e9d8;
  --ink: #1b1b1b;
  --accent-1: #f2b31b;
  --accent-2: #ee7a1f;
  --accent-3: #c62a2f;
  --accent-4: #1e3a8a;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Fante Asafo Flags (Frankaa): Asafo companies are living institutions of Fante towns: each flag belongs to its company, is commissioned when a new captain takes office, is danced at festivals and members' funerals and hung at the company shrine, and its image is often a taunt aimed at a particular rival company. Do not copy a company's flag or emblem for branding, learn what a motif says as a proverb before using it, since a scene can boast or insult, and do not pass off a new flag sewn with a Union Jack as a colonial-era piece: workshops have made flags for collectors and tourists in record numbers since the mid-1990s, including new flags made to look pre-independence. Company imagery has carried political stakes: under colonial rule the British administration imposed strict regulations on asafo companies and their arts. Commission and credit Fante flag-makers' workshops rather than printing imitations.

Guna Mola: The mola is the everyday and ceremonial dress of Guna women and an emblem of Guna identity and autonomy, defended in the 1925 revolution against a Panamanian ban on Guna dress; many motifs draw on Guna cosmology and oral history, and early sergan designs have been studied and reclaimed by Guna representatives. Treat it as a community's living dress, not a decorative print: buy or commission molas from Guna makers and cooperatives, credit them, keep paired panels together, and do not print imitation 'mola' patterns on merchandise. In Panama, Law 20 of 2000 protects Guna dress as collective intellectual property and bars its industrial reproduction, in whole or in part, without official authorisation and the prior consent of the Guna general congresses.

04

The two styles

A stylised warrior raises a curved sword and carries a blue shield while straddling a large turquoise crocodile, with a smaller running figure to the right. A Ghanaian flag, palm tree and red sun fill the cream background, enclosed by a blue-and-yellow patterned border. 1850–present · Sub-Saharan Africa Fante Asafo Flags (Frankaa) The company flags (frankaa) of the Fante asafo, the old warrior companies of Ghana's central coast, widely adopted from the mid-nineteenth century. Flag-makers cut flat silhouettes of animals, people and objects from coloured cotton and sew them onto a plain ground, often inside a border of checks or triangles, with a national flag in the upper hoist corner: a Union Jack until 1957, then Ghana's. Each flag stages one proverb, boast or taunt aimed at rival companies, and is danced, paraded and hung at the company shrine. 1900–present · Latin America & Caribbean Guna Mola The reverse-appliqué blouse panels of Guna women in Panama, made by cutting through two to seven stacked layers of cotton so that every shape is ringed by echoing bands of the colours beneath. Fields are packed with filler slits, sawtooth edges and mazes. The imagery runs from abstract ancestral designs and animals to Bible stories, cartoon characters, brand logos and party slogans, all redrawn in the same contour-echo idiom.

05

More combinations

With Fante Asafo Flags

With Guna Mola

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