Style combination · Contrasts

Corporate Memphis × Global Village Coffeehouse

Both sell big-company friendliness with simplified figures; corporate memphis does it in clean flat vectors on white, GVC in rough woodcut line on earthy, textured grounds, so choose between them by how handmade the warmth should feel.

From the research on Global Village Coffeehouse

Mix them and make something Corporate Memphis Global Village Coffeehouse

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Corporate Memphis, their arrangement from Corporate Memphis, the finish from Global Village Coffeehouse. 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.

Corporate Memphis Global Village Coffeehouse

Type from Global Village Coffeehouse: Hand-lettering
Ornamented display
Colour from Corporate Memphis: Flat fields
Full polychrome
Form from Corporate Memphis: Distortion & exaggeration
Stylised figuration
Composition from Corporate Memphis: Isolated object
Generous white space

Global Village Coffeehouse avoids generous white space: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Surface from Global Village Coffeehouse: Carved line
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Global Village Coffeehouse

Home

Jost, standing in for Neo-hieroglyphic and pictograph dingbat and display fonts from 1990s font packs, which Collins reads as a bid for a more 'universal language' (Are.na, 2018)

Text · Corporate Memphis

The flat vector illustration style that became the default visual voice of big tech in the late 2010s: faceless, ethnically non-specific figures with elongated limbs and tiny heads, drawn in bright flat colour among blobs, leaves and confetti. Codified in Buck's Alegria system for Facebook (2017) and spread by open libraries such as unDraw and Humaaans, it was later named, half-mockingly, after the Memphis Group.

Hanken Grotesk; Corporate Memphis used Circular and Airbnb Cereal

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Corporate Memphis, with a counter-accent from Global Village Coffeehouse. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Corporate Memphis Global Village Coffeehouse

#ffffff ground · 36%
#2f2e41 ink · 14%
#ffc857 accent · 18%
#d19a35 accent · 14%
#6c63ff accent · 10%
#b4532a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffffff;
  --ink: #2f2e41;
  --accent-1: #ffc857;
  --accent-2: #d19a35;
  --accent-3: #6c63ff;
  --accent-4: #b4532a;
  --font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Hanken Grotesk", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Global Village Coffeehouse: The style borrowed ancient and Indigenous imagery as generic primitivism: Collins records kokopelli figures and 'tribal' and hieroglyph-like icons, at times showing 'tribal' figures carrying executives or serving coffee, and Dwell notes vaguely African masks on café walls; kokopelli is a fertility deity of the Hopi, Zuni and other Southwestern peoples. Draw suns, spirals, cups, plants and invented figures instead, leave out kokopelli, masks and other specific peoples' sacred figures, and never show non-Western people as servants or as an exotic backdrop for a product.