Style combination · Contrasts

British Style Press × Punk

Its parent: punk pasted ransom-note chaos onto photocopies, while the style press drew its own ordered alphabets and printed them offset; i-D sits between the two.

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

Mix them and make something British Style Press Punk

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from British Style Press, their arrangement from British Style Press, the finish from Punk. 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) Punk & DIY Zine

Type from British Style Press: Hand-lettering
Geometric sans
Colour from Punk: 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 Punk: Photocopy & distress
Halftone & Ben-Day dots

The type

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

Display · British Style Press

Riot

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

Text · Punk

The graphic voice of punk rock in fanzines, record sleeves and gig flyers: images and words cut from newspapers, typed or scrawled, pasted down and run off on a photocopier. Deliberate crudeness, ransom-note lettering and hijacked mass-media imagery turned cheap reproduction into an anti-professional statement of autonomy and dissent.

Courier Prime; Punk used Ransom-note cut-out lettering and Typewriter faces

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Punk, 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) Punk & DIY Zine

#f2efe6 ground · 36%
#0d0d0d ink · 14%
#ff2fa0 accent · 18%
#f5c400 accent · 14%
#d7191c accent · 10%
#8c8c8c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2efe6;
  --ink: #0d0d0d;
  --accent-1: #ff2fa0;
  --accent-2: #f5c400;
  --accent-3: #d7191c;
  --accent-4: #8c8c8c;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Courier Prime", 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. 1976–1986 · Western Europe, North America Punk & DIY Zine The graphic voice of punk rock in fanzines, record sleeves and gig flyers: images and words cut from newspapers, typed or scrawled, pasted down and run off on a photocopier. Deliberate crudeness, ransom-note lettering and hijacked mass-media imagery turned cheap reproduction into an anti-professional statement of autonomy and dissent.