Stylogeny combining Cranbrook × South African Vernacular Design

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Style combination · Contrasts

Cranbrook × South African Vernacular Design

Both layer vernacular lettering into experimental pages, but Cranbrook starts from literary theory and Ijusi from Durban's streets and the politics of a new democracy; choose by whether the brief is about reading or about place.

From the research on South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

Mix them and make something Cranbrook South African Vernacular Design

NO!NO!Cranbrook × South African1980 · 1995
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Cranbrook, their arrangement from Cranbrook, the finish from South African Vernacular Design. 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 South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

Type from South African Vernacular Design
Colour from Cranbrook
Form from Cranbrook
Composition from Cranbrook
Surface from South African Vernacular Design

02

The type

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

Display · South African Vernacular Design

No!

Sedgwick Ave Display, standing in for Son of Sam (Garth Walker, 2003–04), the Constitutional Court's unicase display face, named after the cell graffiti 'son of sam now son of hope' and built from prison-cell graffiti, a judge's handwriting and site lettering, with numerals after the stencilled cell numbers

Text · Cranbrook

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.

Inter; Cranbrook used Keedy Sans and Dead History

03

The colours

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

Cranbrook & Deconstructivist Typography South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

  • #f2efe6 ground · 36%
  • #141414 ink · 14%
  • #d1342c accent · 18%
  • #ffb612 accent · 14%
  • #c99a2e accent · 10%
  • #f26c28 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2efe6;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #d1342c;
  --accent-2: #ffb612;
  --accent-3: #c99a2e;
  --accent-4: #f26c28;
  --font-display: "Sedgwick Ave Display", cursive;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi): Ijusi's raw material is the work of living people: township sign painters, hair-salon and funeral-parlour sign makers, Zulu beadworkers and wire crafters. The Constitutional Court's typeface also quotes cell graffiti from the Old Fort, whose prisons held activists such as Mandela and Sobukwe and scores of ordinary Black South Africans jailed under the pass laws. Eye's reviewer, who judged Walker's efforts sincere, warned that anyone expecting Black design in i-jusi would find 'very little of it'. Credit and pay the makers whose lettering and craft you quote, commission them where you can, and do not reduce township design to a 'gritty African' texture for a brand with no stake in those streets. The comics issues featured Bitterkomix co-founder Anton Kannemeyer, criticised for 'offensive, racist imagery' in satires such as Pappa in Afrika, which recasts Hergé's Tintin as a white African; do not generate racial caricature outside that authorship and context. Son of Sam was commissioned for the Court's exclusive use.

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. 1995–present · Sub-Saharan Africa South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi) A post-apartheid design language launched in Durban in 1995 by Garth Walker's Orange Juice Design and its free, experimental magazine Ijusi (isiZulu for 'juice'), which asked 'What makes me South African, and what does that look like?'. Trained designers turned from the clean corporate European look to the street: drop-shadowed sign lettering, hair-salon boards, packaging, beadwork and prison graffiti, collaged into many-typeface pages and new fonts such as Son of Sam for the Constitutional Court (2004).

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