Stylogeny combining Cranbrook × Total Design

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Style combination · Contrasts

Cranbrook × Total Design

Cranbrook's layered, reader-dependent pages invert Total Design's single impersonal reading; set one against the other to argue order versus interpretation.

From the research on Total Design & Dutch Functionalism

Mix them and make something Cranbrook Total Design

OrderCranbrook × Total Design1980 · 1963
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Total Design, their arrangement from Cranbrook, the finish from Cranbrook. 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.

Cranbrook & Deconstructivist Typography Total Design & Dutch Functionalism

Type from Cranbrook
Colour from Total Design
Form from Total Design
Composition from Cranbrook
Surface from Cranbrook

02

The type

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

Display · Cranbrook

Order

Inter Tight, standing in for Univers and Helvetica, fragmented and layered

Text · Total Design

The Dutch strand of systematic modernism took shape when Wim Crouwel, Benno Wissing, Friso Kramer and Paul and Dick Schwarz founded Total Design in Amsterdam in 1963 as the country's first multidisciplinary studio. It pushed Swiss grid logic towards the mechanical: visible grids, alphabets constructed on the same module as the page, and one cool, programmatic order applied to museums, airports and corporations alike.

Inter; Total Design used New Alphabet and Univers

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Total Design, with a counter-accent from Cranbrook. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Cranbrook & Deconstructivist Typography Total Design & Dutch Functionalism

  • #ffffff ground · 36%
  • #111111 ink · 14%
  • #e4352a accent · 18%
  • #1e50a2 accent · 14%
  • #c99a2e accent · 10%
  • #bdbdbd accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffffff;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #e4352a;
  --accent-2: #1e50a2;
  --accent-3: #c99a2e;
  --accent-4: #bdbdbd;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

04

The two styles

A tall, distressed collage poster reads “GLASS RIVER” in oversized black, gray, and red letters. Black-and-white fragments of an eye, a bridge, water, mountains, and trees overlap mustard-yellow and red blocks, fine diagrams, and small text on an ivory background. 1980–1998 · North America Cranbrook & Deconstructivist Typography Graduate-school experimentation, centred on Katherine and Michael McCoy's Cranbrook design programme, that applied post-structuralist literary theory to the page. Text and image were layered into dense fields to be read rather than merely seen; typographic hierarchy was fractured, vernacular lettering was mixed with theory, and meaning was left open for the reader to construct. Oversized lowercase lettering reads “urban rhy thm” in black, red and blue on an off-white background with fine grey grid lines. Rectangles, repeated bars and large blue and black circular segments fill the remaining space. 1963–1990 · Western Europe Total Design & Dutch Functionalism The Dutch strand of systematic modernism took shape when Wim Crouwel, Benno Wissing, Friso Kramer and Paul and Dick Schwarz founded Total Design in Amsterdam in 1963 as the country's first multidisciplinary studio. It pushed Swiss grid logic towards the mechanical: visible grids, alphabets constructed on the same module as the page, and one cool, programmatic order applied to museums, airports and corporations alike.

05

More combinations

With Cranbrook

With Total Design

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