Stylogeny combining Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism × Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

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Style combination · Contrasts

Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism × Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

Cool restraint, cropped photography and grotesque type against salsa's loud crowded frontality.

From the research on Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

Mix them and make something Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

POPPOPBlue Note × Fania and1956 · 1964
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism, their arrangement from Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism, the finish from Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves. 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.

Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

Type from Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism avoids ornamented display: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

Colour from Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism
Form from Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism
Composition from Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism
Surface from Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

02

The type

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

Display · Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

Pop

Agbalumo; Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves used Hand-drawn outlined block lettering and Pop-era display faces

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

03

The colours

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

Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

  • #f3efe2 ground · 36%
  • #0d0d0d ink · 14%
  • #e4532a accent · 18%
  • #f5c518 accent · 14%
  • #d19a39 accent · 10%
  • #0b50a1 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f3efe2;
  --ink: #0d0d0d;
  --accent-1: #e4532a;
  --accent-2: #f5c518;
  --accent-3: #d19a39;
  --accent-4: #0b50a1;
  --font-display: "Agbalumo", cursive;
  --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

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. A smiling singer in a bright red jacket reaches toward the viewer beside a vintage microphone, surrounded by musicians playing trumpet, upright bass and congas and a woman dancing in red. Huge red and yellow lettering reading “EL SONERO” fills the top above a colorful backdrop of stars, palms, city buildings and a suspension bridge. 1964–1985 · Latin America & Caribbean, North America Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves The cover language of New York's salsa boom: a record label's sleeves sold a scene and a roster of stars with inked and illustrated bandleader portraits alongside studio photography, comic-strip gags, mugshot and crowd montage, and chunky outlined hand-lettered titles. Crowded, frontal and saturated, with in-group humour, it spoke to a Nuyorican and Caribbean audience in its own pop idiom. The Wanted and mugshot jokes were played by the community's own artists and musicians on stereotypes about Latinos; the idiom should not be reduced to ethnic iconography.

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