Stylogeny combining British Style Press × Grunge Typography

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Style combination · Contrasts

British Style Press × Grunge Typography

Both broke magazine conventions, but grunge eroded and blurred letters while Brody's stay hard-edged and constructed; choose between decay and construction.

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

Mix them and make something British Style Press Grunge Typography

NO!British Style Press × Grunge Typography
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from British Style Press, their arrangement from British Style Press, the finish from Grunge Typography. 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.

British Style Press (The Face, i-D and Arena) Grunge Typography

Type from British Style Press
Colour from Grunge Typography
Form from British Style Press
Composition from British Style Press
Surface from Grunge Typography

02

The type

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

Display · British Style Press

No!

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

Text · Grunge Typography

The 1990s magazine and music-industry style in which type was layered, eroded, overlapped and cropped until legibility became negotiable. Made on the Macintosh but deliberately dirty, it combined distressed digital fonts, scanned textures and blurred, cropped photography with layouts that broke the grid on every spread, treating the page as an expressive surface rather than a neutral container for text.

Special Elite; Grunge Typography used Template Gothic and FF Trixie

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Grunge Typography, 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) Grunge Typography

  • #1b1a17 ground · 36%
  • #e8e2d0 ink · 14%
  • #a8322d accent · 18%
  • #f5c400 accent · 14%
  • #e2231a accent · 10%
  • #6b6b3a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #1b1a17;
  --ink: #e8e2d0;
  --accent-1: #a8322d;
  --accent-2: #f5c400;
  --accent-3: #e2231a;
  --accent-4: #6b6b3a;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Special Elite", monospace;
}

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.

04

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. A distressed collage poster combines oversized lettering reading “TIDE ROT” with a high-contrast image of a derelict ship on a muddy, rocky shoreline. Torn-looking black, cream, rust-orange and olive patches, scratches, and a cropped facial fragment fill the surrounding space. 1990–2000 · North America, Western Europe Grunge Typography The 1990s magazine and music-industry style in which type was layered, eroded, overlapped and cropped until legibility became negotiable. Made on the Macintosh but deliberately dirty, it combined distressed digital fonts, scanned textures and blurred, cropped photography with layouts that broke the grid on every spread, treating the page as an expressive surface rather than a neutral container for text.

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More combinations

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