Style combination · Pairs well

British Style Press × Russian Constructivism

Brody's source: take Rodchenko's diagonals, heavy bars and huge constructed letters, swap agitprop for fashion and club culture, and you get a Face spread.

From the research on British Style Press (The Face, i-D and Arena)

Mix them and make something British Style Press Russian Constructivism

A stylized figure in a dark jacket, loose trousers and sneakers leaps diagonally across a cream poster, with one shoe enlarged in the foreground. Oversized red and black lettering spells “MOVE” above the figure, surrounded by red diagonal bands, yellow shapes and geometric bars. — AI-generated by Stylogeny from the recipe below, and checked against it: the type from British Style Press, the form from Russian Constructivism, the composition from British Style Press. Not a real or historical work.

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.

British Style Press (The Face, i-D and Arena) Russian Constructivism

Type from British Style Press: Hand-lettering
Geometric sans
Colour from Russian Constructivism: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Russian Constructivism: Rules & bars
Rectilinear
Composition from British Style Press: Dynamic asymmetry
Extreme scale contrast
Surface from British Style Press: Flat

The type

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

Display · British Style Press

Circuit

Anton, standing in for Industria (Neville Brody), a geometric, condensed sans-serif drawn for The Face's headlines (1984)

Text · Russian Constructivism

Constructivism rejected art for art's sake in favour of the artist-engineer building useful things for the new Soviet society. In posters, books, film publicity and state advertising it fused bold grotesque type, heavy bars, photomontage and diagonal axes into an urgent, utilitarian language of agitation that shaped modern graphic design worldwide.

Archivo; Russian Constructivism used Soviet heavy grotesques and Rodchenko's constructed block lettering

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Russian Constructivism, with a counter-accent from British Style Press. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

British Style Press (The Face, i-D and Arena) Russian Constructivism

#efe6d2 ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#d1261c accent · 18%
#f5c400 accent · 14%
#c9b28a accent · 10%
#6b6b66 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe6d2;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #d1261c;
  --accent-2: #f5c400;
  --accent-3: #c9b28a;
  --accent-4: #6b6b66;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

British Style Press (The Face, i-D and Arena): The Face, i-D and Arena mastheads, i-D's winking cover device and Brody's typefaces are trademarks or licensed fonts, and the street portraits show real, identifiable people: draw your own alphabet and symbols in the idiom rather than copying a Brody face or a masthead, and do not present a generated spread as a page from these magazines.

The two styles

Oversized black and red lettering reads “CITY NOISE” above overlapping black-and-white images of a short-haired person wearing a hoop earring and dark zippered jacket, and a tall concrete apartment building. Yellow geometric fields, black bars and circles, and a grainy cream background complete the composition.

1980–1990 · Western Europe British Style Press (The Face, i-D and Arena) The London style magazines of the 1980s, chiefly The Face, i-D and Arena, which turned punk's do-it-yourself energy into an ordered editorial language for fashion, music and club culture. Neville Brody drew new geometric headline alphabets and graphic symbols for The Face, set them huge on Constructivist diagonals and heavy bars beside hard-cropped, bleeding photographs, while Terry Jones's i-D kept a rougher instant-design look: typewriter text, street portraits and a winking cover face. 1917–1934 · Eastern Europe Russian Constructivism Constructivism rejected art for art's sake in favour of the artist-engineer building useful things for the new Soviet society. In posters, books, film publicity and state advertising it fused bold grotesque type, heavy bars, photomontage and diagonal axes into an urgent, utilitarian language of agitation that shaped modern graphic design worldwide.