Style combination · Contrasts
Drum Magazine × Fotoromanzo
Drum's photographs report real township life under condensed headlines; the fotoromanzo stages fiction for the camera and runs it as a grid of stills with balloons.
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.
Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance)
- Type from Drum Magazine
- Colour from Fotoromanzo
- Form from Drum Magazine
- Composition from Fotoromanzo
- Surface from Drum Magazine
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Drum Magazine
Together
Anton, standing in for Condensed gothic capitals (the masthead, in white out of a red box at top left: THE AFRICAN DRUM in June 1951, DRUM after Bailey renamed it)
Text · Fotoromanzo
The photo-romance of the Italian women's weeklies: a melodrama told in staged photographs, first printed by Il mio sogno and Bolero Film in May 1947 and copied from France to Brazil. Actors pose on modest sets or in familiar places, and the stills sit in a plain grid of ruled frames, often two or three to a row. Dialogue in balloons and boxes, lettered by hand or typeset, is pasted over the pictures, and close-ups of faces carry the drama. The weeklies printed the stories in black and white until colour took over in the mid-1970s; covers sold each issue with a photograph of the stars.
Comic Neue; Fotoromanzo used Hand-lettered capitals for narration and balloons and Typeset sans in later work
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Fotoromanzo, with a counter-accent from Drum Magazine. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance)
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#f3f0e8ground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#c62a2faccent · 18% -
#f3c934accent · 14% -
#2b5ba6accent · 10% -
#e3a888accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f3f0e8;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #c62a2f;
--accent-2: #f3c934;
--accent-3: #2b5ba6;
--accent-4: #e3a888;
--font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Comic Neue", cursive;
}Use it with care
Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism: Drum's photographs show real, named people, among them prisoners, farm labourers and protesters exposed to humiliation or danger under apartheid, and women cast as pin-ups by a magazine owned and edited by men. Many of the photographs are still under copyright in Bailey's African History Archive (BAHA), and the Drum name and masthead are owned by Media24. Borrow the system (candid black-and-white picture features, hand-tinted cover portraits, boxed punchy cover lines), never a particular photograph, the Drum name or masthead, or a real person's likeness. Do not fabricate 'documentary' scenes of real events or of apartheid-era suffering, and never present a generated image as a Drum photograph or a historical record. Photograph or license your own named subjects; in a generated image, show the subject the brief supplies, dressed and posed with dignity, never an anonymous sexualised pin-up or generic 'township' Black people as retro decor. Drum's glamour sat beside full-page skin-lightener advertisements and sponsored beauty contests: do not lighten skin tones in hand-tinting or revive that beauty ideal.
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance): Photo-romances starred real actors, some later famous (Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren), and their photographs belong to publishers' archives such as the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori: cast your own models, never ask an image model for a real star's likeness, and never present a generated still as a vintage photo-romance.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Drum Magazine
- Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism Pairs well · Two 1950s ways of picturing jazz musicians in black-and-white photographs with condensed capitals; take Blue Note's single giant word and one tint for a calmer, more modernist Drum page.
- South African Resistance Poster Contrasts · The later South African struggle poster argues with screenprinted slogans, emblems and drawn figures; Drum argued through candid photography and urban glamour inside a commercial magazine.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · The same decade's neutral grid and objective photography against Drum's punchy cover lines, hand-tinted pin-ups and crowded boxes.
- South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi) Pairs well · Post-apartheid Ijusi collages the street lettering of the townships Drum photographed; pair Drum's documentary pictures with Ijusi's vernacular type for a South African layout across both eras.
- Onitsha Market Pamphlets Pairs well · Contemporary West African popular print for the same new urban readers; Onitsha's letterpress chapbook covers add a cheaper, home-made counterpart to Drum's hand-tinted cover girls.
With Fotoromanzo
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Both read as ruled panels with speech balloons; choose the fotoromanzo when the cast should be real people posed in black-and-white photographs and the text may run long, and the comic book when drawn heroes, sound effects and flat colour tints should carry the action.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Blow up a single photo-romance frame with its balloon to poster size for a Pop-style quotation of mass romance, as Lichtenstein did with drawn romance comics. Rewriting the balloons is a different precedent: Hara-Kiri's parodies and the Situationists' détournements of Nous Deux, not Pop.
- Onitsha Market Pamphlets Contrasts · Both are cheap popular romance print from 1947; the Onitsha pamphlets tell their stories in letterpress text with a recycled photograph only on the cover, while the fotoromanzo tells the whole story in staged photographs with balloons.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Set the photo-story on an exact modular grid with a neutral grotesque in the dialogue boxes, so the melodrama sits in a clean editorial frame.
- Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Contrasts · Both are cheap picture stories read by millions in monochrome; lianhuanhua draws one framed picture per pocket-sized page with a caption beneath, while the fotoromanzo photographs actors and sets several frames to a magazine page with balloons.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Pairs well · The photo-romance was a raw material René Viénet named in Internationale situationniste no. 11 (1967), calling for photo-romances to be détourned by adding or altering their speech bubbles: keep the photographed lovers and the grid of frames untouched and change only the balloons, so that the melodrama speaks against itself.
- Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover) Contrasts · The postwar photo-romance sold love stories with photographed couples in close-up; the illustrated cover gives up the photograph so that readers can picture themselves in the role and the cover tells nothing of the heat level.
- Giallo Mondadori Covers (I Libri Gialli) Contrasts · Both sold weekly at Italian kiosks, but the photo-romance told melodrama in staged photographs and ruled grids, the giallo in one painted window; set them side by side to contrast photographic and painted suspense.