Style combination · Contrasts

British Style Press × Post-Punk Record Sleeve

Same years and city: Saville kept type sparse or left it off and quoted one image on a single square. Brody's own Fetish and Cabaret Voltaire sleeves belong to that genre; this entry is the editorial system he built alongside them, with oversized drawn headlines across a whole magazine.

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

Mix them and make something British Style Press Post-Punk Record Sleeve

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from British Style Press, their arrangement from British Style Press, the finish from Post-Punk Record Sleeve. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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) Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD)

Type from British Style Press: Hand-lettering
Geometric sans
Colour from Post-Punk Record Sleeve: Dark ground
Monochrome
Form from British Style Press: Rules & bars
Geometric primitives
Composition from British Style Press: Dynamic asymmetry
Extreme scale contrast
Surface from Post-Punk Record Sleeve: Grain & noise
Flat

The type

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

Display · British Style Press

Okay

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

Text · Post-Punk Record Sleeve

The record sleeves that British art-school designers made after punk, for independent labels and some majors: Barney Bubbles at Stiff, Malcolm Garrett for Buzzcocks, Peter Saville at Factory and 23 Envelope at 4AD. Instead of xerox collage, a sleeve became an art-directed object: one quoted or treated image (a pulsar plot, a Fantin-Latour still life, a Futurist poster, a misty photograph) on a quiet field or edge to edge, the band's name shrunk, coded or left off, riddles and catalogue numbers in its place, printed offset on textured, silver, gold or die-cut stock.

Space Mono; Post-Punk Record Sleeve used Peter Saville's colour-coded alphabet, one coloured block per letter, decoded by a wheel on the back of Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) and used for the title of Blue Monday and Small, ordered sans-serif capitals in the manner of Jan Tschichold's New Typography, which Saville took as his model from the 1978 Factory poster onwards

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Post-Punk Record Sleeve, 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) Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD)

#111111 ground · 36%
#ece6da ink · 14%
#f2c230 accent · 18%
#f5c400 accent · 14%
#b8963e accent · 10%
#e2231a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #111111;
  --ink: #ece6da;
  --accent-1: #f2c230;
  --accent-2: #f5c400;
  --accent-3: #b8963e;
  --accent-4: #e2231a;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Space Mono", 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.

Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD): The sleeves are in copyright, and several of their quoted images have their own authors, such as Harold Craft's pulsar plot and Bernard Pierre Wolff's photograph of the Appiani tomb: make a new quotation from a public-domain or licensed source rather than copying a Factory, Stiff or 4AD cover or its colour code.

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. 1977–1990 · Western Europe Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) The record sleeves that British art-school designers made after punk, for independent labels and some majors: Barney Bubbles at Stiff, Malcolm Garrett for Buzzcocks, Peter Saville at Factory and 23 Envelope at 4AD. Instead of xerox collage, a sleeve became an art-directed object: one quoted or treated image (a pulsar plot, a Fantin-Latour still life, a Futurist poster, a misty photograph) on a quiet field or edge to edge, the band's name shrunk, coded or left off, riddles and catalogue numbers in its place, printed offset on textured, silver, gold or die-cut stock.