Style combination · Pairs well

British Style Press × Swiss Punk

Both took modernism apart in the 1980s: add Weingart's layered, tracked grotesques to a Brody spread for a more Swiss, less drawn result.

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

Mix them and make something British Style Press Swiss Punk

A graphic poster combines a large, grainy black-and-white portrait of a person looking upward with an urban streetscape and elevated structure. Oversized black “RADIO CITY” lettering crosses a yellow diagonal band, with a magenta circle, red-orange shapes, and small widely spaced slogans on an off-white background. — AI-generated by Stylogeny from the recipe below, and checked against it: the type from Swiss Punk, the form from British Style Press, 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) Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography

Type from Swiss Punk: Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Wide letterspacing
Colour from British Style Press: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from British Style Press: Rules & bars
Geometric primitives
Composition from British Style Press: Dynamic asymmetry
Extreme scale contrast
Surface from Swiss Punk: Halftone & Ben-Day dots

The type

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

Display · Swiss Punk

Loud

Inter Tight, standing in for Akzidenz-Grotesk

Text · British Style Press

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.

Special Elite; British Style Press used Industria (Neville Brody), a geometric, condensed sans-serif drawn for The Face's headlines and Arcadia and Insignia, a banner face and a headline face Brody drew for Arena, later issued as retail typefaces

The colours

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

British Style Press (The Face, i-D and Arena) Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography

#f3f1ec ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#f5c400 accent · 18%
#e6007e accent · 14%
#e2231a accent · 10%
#8a8a8a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f3f1ec;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #f5c400;
  --accent-2: #e6007e;
  --accent-3: #e2231a;
  --accent-4: #8a8a8a;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", 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.

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. 1968–1990 · Central Europe, North America Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography A rebellion from inside the Swiss school: Wolfgang Weingart and his Basel students kept the grotesque and the grid but set them in motion with extreme letterspacing, stepped and angled lines, rules and bars, enlarged halftone screens and layered film montage. Carried to the US by April Greiman, Dan Friedman and others, it became an intuitive, textured counterpoint to corporate modernism and a bridge to digital postmodern typography.

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