Style combination · Contrasts

DTC 'Blanding' × Slow-Living Editorial

Both use pastels and white space for warmth, but blanding sets lowercase geometric wordmarks and products on seamless backdrops for the phone, while this sets serif text beside lived-in rooms in natural light for print; choose between frictionless and slow.

From the research on Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)

Mix them and make something DTC 'Blanding' Slow-Living Editorial

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Slow-Living Editorial, their arrangement from DTC 'Blanding', the finish from Slow-Living Editorial. 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.

DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)

Type from DTC 'Blanding': Geometric sans
Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Colour from DTC 'Blanding': Pastel
Flat fields
Form from Slow-Living Editorial: Naturalistic depiction
Ornament-free
Composition from DTC 'Blanding': Isolated object
Generous white space
Surface from Slow-Living Editorial: Grain & noise

The type

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

Display · DTC 'Blanding'

Kin

Hanken Grotesk, standing in for Circular (Laurenz Brunner, Lineto, 2013)

Text · Slow-Living Editorial

The look of Kinfolk, the slow-living quarterly founded in Portland in 2011 and run from Copenhagen since 2015, and of the indie lifestyle titles and Instagram feeds that copied it. Soft, naturally lit photographs of laid tables, wood-and-linen interiors and their unhurried owners sit in wide white margins on matte paper; a classical serif and slender capitals carry little text; colour stays in whites, oatmeal, wood and pastel. By 2014 'Kinfolk' was used as an adjective for a kind of photography.

EB Garamond; Slow-Living Editorial used Garamond, Kinfolk's brand typeface, kept for body text through Charlotte Heal's 2015 redesign and The slender capitals of the KINFOLK masthead, 'the same slender text as on the cover of each of the magazine's issues' (Portland Monthly, 2014), reworked by Abi Huynh in 2015

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from DTC 'Blanding', with a counter-accent from Slow-Living Editorial. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)

#faf7f2 ground · 36%
#2b2b2b ink · 14%
#d27c5d accent · 18%
#9a7b5f accent · 14%
#f4cfc8 accent · 10%
#a9b8a1 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #faf7f2;
  --ink: #2b2b2b;
  --accent-1: #d27c5d;
  --accent-2: #9a7b5f;
  --accent-3: #f4cfc8;
  --accent-4: #a9b8a1;
  --font-display: "Hanken Grotesk", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}

Use it with care

Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look): Kinfolk and Cereal are living titles with their own mastheads and photographers: take the method (natural light, wide margins, a quiet serif), shoot or license your own pictures, and never letter the KINFOLK masthead or present a layout as an issue. Critics noted that its early pages pictured mostly young, white and beautiful people; cast, locate and style photographs widely so the calm does not become a single social type. By 2016 the magazine itself was casting more widely (FIT Library blog), so take the later issues, not the early imitators, as the model.