Style combination · Contrasts
City Pop Illustration × Synthwave
Both put palms and cars on a 1980s horizon, but synthwave lights them in neon at night over a grid and chrome; switch to city pop for clear daylight, a deep blue sky and flat, cool colour.
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.
City Pop Illustration Synthwave / Outrun
- Type from City Pop Illustration
- Colour from City Pop Illustration
- Form from Synthwave
- Composition from Synthwave
- Surface from Synthwave
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City Pop Illustration avoids chrome & 3d render and glitch: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · City Pop Illustration
Memory
Bebas Neue, standing in for Large bold condensed capitals, the second word spaced out with interpuncts, one letter picked out in red, as in A LONG V·A·C·A·T·I·O·N on Nagai's sleeve for Ohtaki (1981)
Text · Synthwave
The retro-futurist look of synthwave music: a 1980s revival that grew from mid-2000s French electro and online synth scenes, took its other name from Sega's arcade racer Out Run (1986) and reached the mainstream with Drive (2011). Its register runs from the brooding night drives of Kavinsky and Hotline Miami to the affectionate parody of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and Kung Fury. The visuals, settled around 2010–2013, recall the era's film posters, arcades and VHS: a neon grid running to a banded setting sun, chrome logotypes and hot-pink script, palms and sports cars at night, tape noise.
VT323; Synthwave used Mistral (Roger Excoffon, Fonderie Olive, 1953), the brush script set in hot pink for the Drive poster title and Custom chrome-bevelled, airbrushed logotypes with star glints, after 1980s film-poster and arcade titles
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from City Pop Illustration, with a counter-accent from Synthwave. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
City Pop Illustration Synthwave / Outrun
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#f7f5efground · 36% -
#0f3a8aink · 14% -
#f2c230accent · 18% -
#05d9e8accent · 14% -
#35a9dcaccent · 10% -
#f3a5b6accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f7f5ef;
--ink: #0f3a8a;
--accent-1: #f2c230;
--accent-2: #05d9e8;
--accent-3: #35a9dc;
--accent-4: #f3a5b6;
--font-display: "Bebas Neue", sans-serif;
--font-text: "VT323", monospace;
}Use it with care
City Pop Illustration: The look rests on two working artists, Hiroshi Nagai and Eizin Suzuki, who still paint, sell originals and prints and take commissions. For their pictures, commission or license them. Otherwise invent your own place, light and palette in the shared idiom: never trace or recompose their compositions (A Long Vacation's pool, For You's radio shop, Pacific Breeze's villas), never ask an image model for their style by name, and never present a generated image as their work or as a period sleeve.
Synthwave / Outrun: Since about 2015 far-right 'fashwave' has appropriated synthwave, setting fascist symbols, classical statues and slogans on neon grids and swapping the classic neon sun for the Nazi Black Sun; keep the sun a plain banded disc, avoid sunwheel, eagle and bust-plus-slogan layouts, and check where borrowed fan art and music come from.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With City Pop Illustration
- Googie & Atomic Age Pairs well · Googie's motels, diners and boomerang roadside signs are the American architecture these painters idealised; borrow its signage and script for the fascias in a city pop street scene.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Suzuki fills his streets with painted shop names; real sign-writers' letterforms make the fascias in a city pop scene read as made rather than typeset.
- Vaporwave Contrasts · Nagai's resorts fed vaporwave, which collages palms and pools with busts, dialog boxes and glitches as ironic consumer debris; choose city pop when the place should be painted sincerely, whole and uncluttered.
- Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic Contrasts · Both are sincere, painted and calm, and both found a worldwide audience on YouTube, lofi in its 24/7 streams and city pop in its 2010s revival; lofi puts one absorbed anime figure in a lamp-lit room at dusk with soft edges, city pop opens onto an empty sunlit place under a deep blue sky in hard-edged colour. Choose city pop when the brief is a place, not a person.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Nagai drew on pop art and on David Hockney, a British pop artist who painted Los Angeles swimming pools in acrylic, rather than on Warhol's quotation: pop art appropriates mass-media images with halftone and irony, city pop paints an invented place sincerely in flat, untextured colour; choose city pop when the picture should invite rather than comment.
- Flat Design Pairs well · City pop's hard-edged, untextured fields translate directly into vector illustration; use them for web heroes and app splash screens that need a calm sense of place rather than icons, keeping city pop's deep perspective, which flat design avoids.
- Showa and Heisei Retro Revival (Japanese Packaging and Kissaten Graphics) Pairs well · Shares 1980s nostalgia; pair its painted, airy scenes with retro tableware graphics for a fuller period feel.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Pairs well · Eizin Suzuki drew his city-pop sleeves and FM Station covers in a ligne-claire manner likened to Hergé's, rendering gradation in solid lines; pair them for a sunlit resort or street scene drawn in clear line under a deep blue sky, keeping ligne claire's unshaded colour.
With Synthwave
- Hong Kong Neon & Beiwei Shop-Sign Lettering Pairs well · Real neon-tube shop lettering gives synthwave's painted glow a street-level counterpart for night-market, bar or club identities; use real Beiwei forms and credit the sign-makers rather than dressing the scene in random Chinese characters.
- Dark Tech Minimalism Contrasts · Both live on dark grounds, but dark tech minimalism keeps gradients faint and drops nostalgia and ornament; switch to it when the neon sunset would shout over the content.
- Bitmap & Pixel Graphics Pairs well · Pixel sprites and bitmap type are synthwave's arcade inheritance, as Hotline Miami shows; set them over the neon grid for game key art and title screens.
- Rave & Acid House Graphics Pairs well · Both put chrome logotypes and airbrushed fantasy horizons in neon on black; borrow the flyer's crammed line-up reverse to turn a synthwave key visual into a working event poster.
- Vaporwave Contrasts · Vaporwave takes the same grids and neon into pastel, ironic collage of malls, desktops and stock imagery; choose synthwave for a heartfelt or affectionately parodic night drive and vaporwave when the nostalgia itself should be questioned.
- Analog Horror Graphics Contrasts · Both finish 1980s screens with VHS tracking noise, scanlines and grain, but synthwave treats the decade with affection, in neon grids, chrome type and sunsets, while analog horror makes it a flat, official screen that is failing. Keep neon and chrome out, and let the noise mean something is wrong.
- Polish Cold War Neon (PRL Neonisation) Contrasts · Synthwave remembers neon as a glowing grid, chrome and sunset gradients on a screen; the Polish signs were real tubes in one or two colours with no gradients. Use the contrast to keep a neon revival honest to the single line.
- Cassette Futurism Contrasts · Neon grids and chrome sunsets show a glamorous 1980s; cassette futurism shows its workaday machinery.