Style combination · Pairs well

Drum Magazine × South African Vernacular Design

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.

From the research on Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism

Mix them and make something Drum Magazine South African Vernacular Design

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Drum Magazine, their arrangement from Drum Magazine, the finish from Drum Magazine. 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.

Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

Type from South African Vernacular Design: Hand-lettering
Eclectic mixing
Colour from South African Vernacular Design: Full polychrome
Flat fields
Form from Drum Magazine: Naturalistic depiction
Rules & bars
Composition from Drum Magazine: Framed panels
Layered information
Surface from Drum Magazine: Grain & noise
Halftone & Ben-Day dots

The type

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

Display · South African Vernacular Design

Together

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 · Drum Magazine

The picture magazine of Black urban Africa in the 1950s. Drum adapted the Life and Picture Post formula to Johannesburg: Jürgen Schadeberg, its photographer and layout artist, and the Black photographers he trained filled it with close, candid black-and-white pictures of jazz, boxing, shebeens, defiance and undercover exposés, behind covers of hand-tinted stars and cover girls framed by a red-box masthead and boxed cover lines. By 1959 it distributed 240,000 copies a month across Africa.

Archivo; Drum Magazine used Condensed gothic capitals and Swash italic and brush script

The colours

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

Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

#ece4d2 ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#ffb612 accent · 18%
#f26c28 accent · 14%
#d42a2f accent · 10%
#002395 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ece4d2;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #ffb612;
  --accent-2: #f26c28;
  --accent-3: #d42a2f;
  --accent-4: #002395;
  --font-display: "Sedgwick Ave Display", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

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.

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.

The two styles

A distressed vintage-style music poster features a large black-and-white image of a woman singing into a microphone, with smaller photographs of a saxophonist, a smiling couple, and dancers down the left. Oversized cream lettering on red reads “NEW BEAT,” alongside a yellow headline panel and a red footer reading “Music Lives Here.”

1951–1965 · Sub-Saharan Africa Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism The picture magazine of Black urban Africa in the 1950s. Drum adapted the Life and Picture Post formula to Johannesburg: Jürgen Schadeberg, its photographer and layout artist, and the Black photographers he trained filled it with close, candid black-and-white pictures of jazz, boxing, shebeens, defiance and undercover exposés, behind covers of hand-tinted stars and cover girls framed by a red-box masthead and boxed cover lines. By 1959 it distributed 240,000 copies a month across Africa. 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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