Stylogeny combining Drum Magazine × Onitsha Market Pamphlets

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Style combination · Pairs well

Drum Magazine × Onitsha Market Pamphlets

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.

From the research on Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism

Mix them and make something Drum Magazine Onitsha Market Pamphlets

SQUAREDrum Magazine × Onitsha Market1951 · 1947
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Drum Magazine, their arrangement from Drum Magazine, the finish from Onitsha Market Pamphlets. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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 Onitsha Market Pamphlets

Type from Drum Magazine
Colour from Onitsha Market Pamphlets
Form from Drum Magazine
Composition from Drum Magazine
Surface from Onitsha Market Pamphlets

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The type

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

Display · Drum Magazine

Square

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 · Onitsha Market Pamphlets

Cheap, stapled pamphlets of romance, advice, drama and political biography, written by students, clerks, journalists and traders and printed by jobbing letterpress shops around Onitsha Main Market in eastern Nigeria from the late 1940s. Covers did the selling at the stall: long moralising titles in mixed jobbing type, the price and the author's pen-name, and recycled photographs on coloured card. The trade lost its presses in the Nigeria–Biafra War and revived only briefly afterwards.

Inter; Onitsha Market Pamphlets used Jobbing grotesque and gothic capitals for cover titles and Hand-set book roman for the running text

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Onitsha Market Pamphlets, with a counter-accent from Drum Magazine. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism Onitsha Market Pamphlets

  • #ece3cc ground · 36%
  • #1a1a1a ink · 14%
  • #b8312f accent · 18%
  • #e3a0a8 accent · 14%
  • #4f7fb8 accent · 10%
  • #7fa36b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ece3cc;
  --ink: #1a1a1a;
  --accent-1: #b8312f;
  --accent-2: #e3a0a8;
  --accent-3: #4f7fb8;
  --accent-4: #7fa36b;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", 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.

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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. 1947–1980 · Sub-Saharan Africa Onitsha Market Pamphlets Cheap, stapled pamphlets of romance, advice, drama and political biography, written by students, clerks, journalists and traders and printed by jobbing letterpress shops around Onitsha Main Market in eastern Nigeria from the late 1940s. Covers did the selling at the stall: long moralising titles in mixed jobbing type, the price and the author's pen-name, and recycled photographs on coloured card. The trade lost its presses in the Nigeria–Biafra War and revived only briefly afterwards.

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With Onitsha Market Pamphlets

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