Stylogeny combining Dark Academia × Slow-Living Editorial

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Style combination · Contrasts

Dark Academia × Slow-Living Editorial

Shares muted earth tones and humanist serifs, but airy and light where this is dim and dense.

From the research on Dark Academia

Mix them and make something Dark Academia Slow-Living Editorial

DaydreamDark Academia × Slow-Living Editorial
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Slow-Living Editorial, their arrangement from Dark Academia, the finish from Dark Academia. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Dark Academia Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)

Type from Slow-Living Editorial
Colour from Dark Academia
Form from Slow-Living Editorial
Composition from Dark Academia

Slow-Living Editorial avoids horror vacui: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

Surface from Dark Academia

02

The type

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

Display · Slow-Living Editorial

Daydream

EB Garamond, standing in for Garamond, Kinfolk's brand typeface, kept for body text through Charlotte Heal's 2015 redesign (It's Nice That, 2015)

Text · Slow-Living Editorial

The look of Kinfolk, the slow-living quarterly founded in Portland in 2011 and run from Copenhagen since 2015, and of the indie lifestyle titles and Instagram feeds that copied it. Soft, naturally lit photographs of laid tables, wood-and-linen interiors and their unhurried owners sit in wide white margins on matte paper; a classical serif and slender capitals carry little text; colour stays in whites, oatmeal, wood and pastel. By 2014 'Kinfolk' was used as an adjective for a kind of photography.

EB Garamond; Slow-Living Editorial used Garamond, Kinfolk's brand typeface, kept for body text through Charlotte Heal's 2015 redesign and The slender capitals of the KINFOLK masthead, 'the same slender text as on the cover of each of the magazine's issues' (Portland Monthly, 2014), reworked by Abi Huynh in 2015

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Dark Academia, with a counter-accent from Slow-Living Editorial. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Dark Academia Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)

  • #16110e ground · 39%
  • #e8dcc4 ink · 15%
  • #c9b79c accent · 20%
  • #9a7b5f accent · 15%
  • #1c2a45 accent · 11%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #16110e;
  --ink: #e8dcc4;
  --accent-1: #c9b79c;
  --accent-2: #9a7b5f;
  --accent-3: #1c2a45;
  --font-display: "EB Garamond", serif;
  --font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}

Use it with care

Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look): Kinfolk and Cereal are living titles with their own mastheads and photographers: take the method (natural light, wide margins, a quiet serif), shoot or license your own pictures, and never letter the KINFOLK masthead or present a layout as an issue. Critics noted that its early pages pictured mostly young, white and beautiful people; cast, locate and style photographs widely so the calm does not become a single social type. By 2016 the magazine itself was casting more widely (FIT Library blog), so take the later issues, not the early imitators, as the model.

04

The two styles

2014–present · Global / networked, North America, Western Europe Dark Academia A moodboard aesthetic of candlelit libraries, Gothic and Collegiate Gothic colleges, dark wooden furniture and autumn imagery, in black, white, beige, browns, dark green and occasionally navy. Classical serif quotations and book imagery carry its nostalgic, brooding romance of scholarship. Critics note a perceived Eurocentrism and lack of diversity, an elitism that excludes outsiders, and a glamourising of sleep deprivation, overwork and substance misuse; the aesthetic romanticises all of these. A cream poster headed “SLOW DAYS” shows a sunlit wooden table with a ceramic mug, a bowl of pears, a glass jar of white wildflowers, and a rumpled pale cloth. A wooden chair and window appear behind the table, with leafy shadows falling across the wall and tabletop. 2011–present · North America, Northern Europe, Global / networked Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look) The look of Kinfolk, the slow-living quarterly founded in Portland in 2011 and run from Copenhagen since 2015, and of the indie lifestyle titles and Instagram feeds that copied it. Soft, naturally lit photographs of laid tables, wood-and-linen interiors and their unhurried owners sit in wide white margins on matte paper; a classical serif and slender capitals carry little text; colour stays in whites, oatmeal, wood and pastel. By 2014 'Kinfolk' was used as an adjective for a kind of photography.

05

More combinations

With Dark Academia

With Slow-Living Editorial

Every style combination