Stylogeny combining City Pop Illustration × Vaporwave

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Style combination · Contrasts

City Pop Illustration × Vaporwave

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.

From the research on City Pop Illustration

Mix them and make something City Pop Illustration Vaporwave

MEMORYMEMORYMEMORYCity Pop Illustration × Vaporwave1979 · 2011
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from City Pop Illustration, their arrangement from City Pop Illustration, the finish from Vaporwave. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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 Vaporwave

Type from Vaporwave
Colour from City Pop Illustration
Form from City Pop Illustration
Composition from City Pop Illustration
Surface from Vaporwave

City Pop Illustration avoids glitch and chrome & 3d render: 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 · Vaporwave

Memory

Syncopate, standing in for Full-width Latin text (ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ)

Text · City Pop Illustration

The painted look of Japanese city pop record sleeves and magazine covers, fixed by Hiroshi Nagai's sleeve for Eiichi Ohtaki's A Long Vacation (1981) and Eizin Suzuki's for Tatsuro Yamashita's For You (1982). Idealised, sunlit resort scenes of pools, palms, modernist villas, roadside shops and cars by the sea under a deep blue sky, built from hard-edged flat colour with Nagai's black shadows or Suzuki's clean outlines, and usually few or no people. Aspirational in Japan's boom years, it returned with the city pop revival from the 2010s and is now read as nostalgia.

Shippori Mincho; City Pop Illustration used Widely letter-spaced sans-serif capitals for title and artist, set small in the sky at the top left of the full-bleed picture, as in FOR YOU and TATSURO YAMASHITA on Suzuki's sleeve (1982) and 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)

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from City Pop Illustration, with a counter-accent from Vaporwave. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

City Pop Illustration Vaporwave

  • #f7f5ef ground · 36%
  • #0f3a8a ink · 14%
  • #f2c230 accent · 18%
  • #01cdfe accent · 14%
  • #35a9dc accent · 10%
  • #b967ff accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f7f5ef;
  --ink: #0f3a8a;
  --accent-1: #f2c230;
  --accent-2: #01cdfe;
  --accent-3: #35a9dc;
  --accent-4: #b967ff;
  --font-display: "Syncopate", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

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.

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The two styles

A sunlit swimming pool beside a modern white seaside villa overlooks a blue sea, a small sailboat, and distant coastal mountains. Palm trees and flowering plants frame the view beneath a blue sky with the widely spaced white title “SEAWAY.” 1979–present · East Asia, Global / networked City Pop Illustration The painted look of Japanese city pop record sleeves and magazine covers, fixed by Hiroshi Nagai's sleeve for Eiichi Ohtaki's A Long Vacation (1981) and Eizin Suzuki's for Tatsuro Yamashita's For You (1982). Idealised, sunlit resort scenes of pools, palms, modernist villas, roadside shops and cars by the sea under a deep blue sky, built from hard-edged flat colour with Nagai's black shadows or Suzuki's clean outlines, and usually few or no people. Aspirational in Japan's boom years, it returned with the city pop revival from the 2010s and is now read as nostalgia. A large classical sculpted head rises from a turquoise swimming pool beneath a striped yellow-pink sun, surrounded by palm trees, waterfalls, city buildings and tropical foliage. Floating computer windows, a dolphin, cherry blossoms, a compact disc and a wireframe globe fill the pink-and-purple sky beneath the title “DREAM POOL.” 2011–2017 · Global / networked, North America Vaporwave An internet-born microgenre and visual aesthetic that remixes the debris of late-20th-century consumer culture (Windows 95 dialogs, classical busts, palm trees, mall interiors, Japanese text, early 3D renders) in pastel pinks and cyans. Emerging around 2011 from records by James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Vektroid, it is at once nostalgic homage and deadpan critique of corporate optimism.

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More combinations

With City Pop Illustration

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With Vaporwave

All 19 combinations with Vaporwave

Every style combination