Style combination · Contrasts

Emigre × South African Vernacular Design

Ijusi's Typografika issues answered the 1990s experimental-font culture (Walker's Red Mercury pays tribute to Jonathan Barnbrook, whose early faces Emigre released), but drew their letters from Durban's shopfront hoardings, funeral parlours, beadwork and wire craft rather than from the screen; use Emigre for the digital edge and Ijusi for a sense of place.

From the research on South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

Mix them and make something Emigre South African Vernacular Design

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Emigre, their arrangement from South African Vernacular Design, the finish from South African Vernacular Design. 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.

Emigre & Early Digital Type South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

Type from Emigre: Bitmap & pixel
Experimental & distorted
Colour from Emigre: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from Emigre: Rectilinear
Rules & bars
Composition from South African Vernacular Design: Collage & layering
Dynamic asymmetry
Surface from South African Vernacular Design: Hard offset shadow

The type

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

Display · Emigre

No!

Workbench; Emigre used Oakland and Emperor

Text · South African Vernacular Design

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).

Newsreader; South African Vernacular Design used 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 and Red Mercury (Garth Walker), a tribute to Jonathan Barnbrook alluding to South Africa's covert nuclear defence programme

The colours

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

Emigre & Early Digital Type South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

#f4f2ec ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#e03c31 accent · 18%
#ffb612 accent · 14%
#2b59c3 accent · 10%
#f26c28 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f2ec;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #e03c31;
  --accent-2: #ffb612;
  --accent-3: #2b59c3;
  --accent-4: #f26c28;
  --font-display: "Workbench", monospace;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", 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.

The two styles

Oversized, distorted letters spell “DATA NOiSE” in black, red and blue on an off-white background. Pixelated edges, dotted textures, scattered squares and intersecting rules surround and interrupt the lettering.

1984–1998 · North America Emigre & Early Digital Type Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko's magazine and type foundry, launched in 1984 alongside the first Macintosh, turned the computer's low-resolution constraints into a new typographic idiom. Licko's bitmap and modular faces, VanderLans's shifting, layered layouts and the magazine's showcase of Cranbrook and CalArts work made Emigre the laboratory and mouthpiece of digital postmodern typography. 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).

More combinations

With Emigre

With South African Vernacular Design

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