Style combination · Pairs well
West African Barbershop × Pop Art Graphics
Both repeat one head in a grid with small variations; pair Warhol's serial portraits with painted, named hairstyles for a warmer, hand-made take on repetition.
Mix them and make something West African Barbershop Pop Art Graphics
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.
West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs Pop Art Graphics
- Type from West African Barbershop
- Colour from Pop Art Graphics
- Form from West African Barbershop
- Composition from West African Barbershop
- Surface from Pop Art Graphics
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · West African Barbershop
Fiesta
Bungee, standing in for Outlined, drop-shadowed block capitals by sign painters
Text · Pop Art Graphics
Pop turned the commercial imagery of post-war consumer culture (comics, packaging, celebrity photographs and advertising) into both its subject and its method. Images are appropriated, enlarged, flattened and repeated; colour is bright and unmodulated; and the printing process itself, from Ben-Day dots to off-register silkscreen, is left visible as a sign of mass production.
Archivo; Pop Art Graphics used Comic-book hand lettering and Franklin Gothic
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Pop Art Graphics, with a counter-accent from West African Barbershop. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs Pop Art Graphics
-
#fbf8f0ground · 36% -
#111111ink · 14% -
#ffd400accent · 18% -
#f2c230accent · 14% -
#e10600accent · 10% -
#c8232caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #fbf8f0;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #ffd400;
--accent-2: #f2c230;
--accent-3: #e10600;
--accent-4: #c8232c;
--font-display: "Bungee", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With West African Barbershop
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Treat the hairstyle board as a humane pictogram chart: one consistent figure per cell, labelled, for comparison at a glance.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Use the sign writer's shaded capitals for the shop band and the barbershop grid of painted heads below it, as the boards themselves do.
- Ghanaian Movie Poster Contrasts · Same painters' media and cities but opposite temperament; set the calm, catalogue-like heads against the lurid, distorted drama of the movie posters.
- Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) Contrasts · Both lay out named, numbered pictures in rows and columns, but a barbershop sign is one hand-painted menu of heads that differ only in their hairstyle, under the shop's boast, while a lotería tabla is a printed board of unrelated emblems, one of a set of boards that each hold a different selection from the same deck.
- Matatu & Nganya Art Pairs well · Another African street commission built on painted heads; pair the barbershop board's frontal, stylised faces with the matatu's airbrushed, foreshortened star portraits for a Nairobi street layout.
- South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi) Pairs well · Hair-salon boards were among Ijusi's sources; pair a painted grid of named hairstyles with a many-typeface layout and found photographs.
- Tingatinga Painting Pairs well · Both are hand-painted enamel on board for a street market; borrow the sign painter's outlined capitals to give Tingatinga figures a title or shop name.
With Pop Art Graphics
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Set one loud appropriated Pop image inside a strict grid with a neutral grotesque so the irony reads as deliberate rather than chaotic.
- Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics Contrasts · Where Pop multiplies glossy commodities, wabi-sabi values the single worn object; use one to puncture the mood of the other.
- Guna Mola Pairs well · Guna women redraw brand logos and cartoons (RCA Victor, Bullwinkle) in reverse appliqué; let that act of translation inspire Pop work, but buy or commission molas rather than imitating them.
- Neo-Brutalism Pairs well · Lift Pop's thick black outlines and flat primaries into UI cards and buttons for a confident, comic-strip interface.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print Ben-Day dot screens in fluorescent pink and yellow riso inks to give Pop's mass-media imagery a small-run, handmade warmth.
- Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Pairs well · Shepard Fairey called Kozik 'the punk rock Warhol'; take Pop's appropriated cartoons and halftones and give them a gig poster's single idea and hand-lettered title.
- Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism) Pairs well · Contemporaries in saturated flat colour at a giant scale; borrow pop's isolated, enlarged object for a poster, but drop its halftone and irony to keep Marimekko's sincerity.
- Superflat Contrasts · Both turn commodities into art; take Pop's repetition and frontal commodity but swap its halftone and off-register silkscreen for Superflat's smooth vector fills and anime characters, so the print process disappears.