Style combination · Contrasts
Black Metal Graphics × Punk
Punk fed black metal's birth (Hellhammer's Tom G. Warrior heard Discharge as 'a revolution, much like Venom'), and both run off a photocopier for a scene that refuses polish; but punk crowds the sheet with ransom-note collage and irony while black metal leaves one dark photograph and one mirrored logo on an empty black field; choose between noise and silence.
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.
Black Metal Graphics Punk & DIY Zine
- Type from Punk
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Black Metal Graphics avoids eclectic mixing: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Colour from Black Metal Graphics
- Form from Black Metal Graphics
- Composition from Black Metal Graphics
- Surface from Punk
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Black Metal Graphics
The visual language of black metal, fixed by Norway's second wave in the early 1990s, now worldwide, since the 2010s borrowed by mainstream acts (Szpajdel's Rihanna and Metallica logos, 2016). A hand-drawn band logo, barely legible, its letters grown into thorns and branches and balanced on a central axis, sits white on black over one bleak picture: a grainy black-and-white photograph of a corpse-painted musician, a church, a forest or a Romantic painting. Early covers, xeroxed like punk's, rejected death metal's bright painted art; the tone is misanthropic, pagan or occult, never ironic.
Special Elite; Black Metal Graphics used Hand-inked thorned, mirrored logotype and Old English Text and Fraktur capitals
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Black Metal Graphics, with a counter-accent from Punk. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Black Metal Graphics Punk & DIY Zine
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#0a0a0aground · 36% -
#e6e2d8ink · 14% -
#6f6f6faccent · 18% -
#f7e400accent · 14% -
#2a2a2aaccent · 10% -
#ff2fa0accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #0a0a0a;
--ink: #e6e2d8;
--accent-1: #6f6f6f;
--accent-2: #f7e400;
--accent-3: #2a2a2a;
--accent-4: #ff2fa0;
--font-display: "Rock Salt", cursive;
--font-text: "Special Elite", monospace;
}Use it with care
Black Metal Graphics: The Norwegian scene's early-1990s fame rests partly on real crimes: church arsons from 1992 and two murders. Varg Vikernes of Burzum, sentenced in 1994 for the murder of Euronymous and four church arsons, is credited with bringing neo-Nazi views into the scene, and a small National Socialist black metal minority still spreads them through lyrics and imagery; even Darkthrone had to remove a slogan about race from a 1994 back cover after distributors objected. Cite Burzum sleeves only as history, and take mood from the public-domain Kittelsen and Doré pictures instead. Borrow the mirrored logo, the black field and the bleak photograph, but never a burnt or burning church, a photograph of a real death, or far-right symbols: no Black Sun (Sonnenrad), winged or serifed odal rune, wolfsangel, SS runes or Totenkopf, and no slogan about race or nation in blackletter. Inverted crosses and pentagrams signal hostility to Christianity; weigh them before using them for a general audience. Logos are the commissioned, living work of named letterers such as Szpajdel: commission or credit one rather than copying a band's name or mark.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Black Metal Graphics
- Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Pairs well · Both work in black and white with jagged, angular marks and dread; cut a forest or a church as a black woodcut for a cover that needs a picture but not a photograph.
- Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Pairs well · Take one broken-script title from the gothic tradition and set it small under a hand-drawn thorned logo, in white on black, so the old letter reads as menace instead of a page of text.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Contrasts · Both put one image on a quiet, often black field, but post-punk shrinks, codes or omits the band's name, prints offset on special stock and hides riddles for the art-literate, while black metal makes a hand-drawn, near-illegible logo the centre of a xeroxed, earnest sleeve; choose between a coded name and a sigil.
- Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Contrasts · The gig poster sells a show with fluorescent inks, cartoons and a knowing wink; strip it to black, bone white and a mirrored logo to see how much the wink was doing.
- Art Nouveau Pairs well · Szpajdel's cited source: borrow Art Nouveau's vegetal, space-filling lettering and mirror it, then sharpen every curve into a thorn and drop the colour.
- Grunge Typography Contrasts · Both made legibility negotiable in the 1990s, but grunge layered and eroded digital type across a broken grid, while black metal draws one logo by hand and centres it in emptiness; pick analogue symmetry or digital disorder.
- Gabber and Hardcore Graphics (Rotterdam and Thunderdome) Contrasts · Both use menace and emblems, but one is neon and rendered, the other monochrome and hand-inked.
- Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer) Contrasts · Burzum's Filosofem (1996) put Kittelsen's 'Op under Fjeldet toner en Lur' on its cover; mind the caution before borrowing that framing, and keep the folk-tale humour and tenderness the sleeves leave out.
With Punk
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Borrow Constructivist diagonals and red-and-black bars to give punk collage the agitprop structure post-punk sleeves later adopted.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Run punk collages through a riso in fluoro pink and black to keep the DIY ethic while gaining richer, layered colour.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Deface a clean corporate identity with xerox collage to make the critique of polish and authority explicit.
- Frutiger Aero Contrasts · Glossy optimism is everything punk rejects; one torn xerox fragment on an aero gradient reads as instant sabotage.
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas) Contrasts · Both mix found type with appropriated pictures, but punk tears and photocopies while Fluxus keeps a clean offset black, justified blocks and a tight edge-to-edge grid; use the Fluxus version when cheap materials should still look ordered.
- Natural Wine Label Art Pairs well · Alice Feiring calls the earlier natural-wine scene punk rock: of Gut Oggau she says 'This is where things grow up and stop being so punk rock' (Punch, 2021). Take punk's refusal of professional polish but drop the collage and the anger: one felt-pen picture on a white label carries the same do-it-yourself stance in a friendlier voice.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Contrasts · Both scribble over photographs, but punk's photocopied blacks and ransom-note type are cheap and nihilist, while Grapus prints bright offset colour, mostly on white, in an optimistic, party-backed voice.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Contrasts · Punk reprised the situationist prank in the late 1970s, but it packs torn photocopies and mixed type into crowded pages; détournement keeps a few recognisable fragments and lets each one say the opposite of what it said. Borrow the rewritten balloon when a punk layout needs a sharper argument.