Style combination · Contrasts
Emigre × Neo-Swiss Revival
Neo-Swiss restraint is the foil to Emigre's typographic overload; one Emigre display face in a neo-Swiss layout adds personality.
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.
Emigre & Early Digital Type Neo-Swiss Revival
- Type from Emigre
- Colour from Neo-Swiss Revival
- Form from Emigre
- Composition from Neo-Swiss Revival
- Surface from Emigre
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Neo-Swiss Revival
A contemporary revival of the International Typographic Style, fuelled by digital re-releases of neo-grotesques and by studios such as Experimental Jetset and Norm: modular grids, flush-left grotesque type, huge tightly set headlines and flat fields of black, white and one signal colour. It treats Swiss modernism as a living toolkit for posters, identities and the responsive web, sometimes with a knowing, citational wink.
Inter; Neo-Swiss Revival used Akkurat and Neue Haas Grotesk
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Neo-Swiss Revival, with a counter-accent from Emigre. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Emigre & Early Digital Type Neo-Swiss Revival
-
#f5f5f0ground · 36% -
#111111ink · 14% -
#ff4a1caccent · 18% -
#1d3bffaccent · 14% -
#2b59c3accent · 10% -
#c8c8c3accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f5f5f0;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #ff4a1c;
--accent-2: #1d3bff;
--accent-3: #2b59c3;
--accent-4: #c8c8c3;
--font-display: "Workbench", monospace;
--font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Emigre
- Out-of-Square Hangul Typography Pairs well · Ahn Sang-soo's Bogoseo/Bogoseo ran a parallel 1980s magazine experiment with a constructed alphabet; set an Emigre face beside out-of-square Hangul for a bilingual experimental spread.
- Bitmap & Pixel Graphics Pairs well · Combine Emigre's bitmap faces with early-Mac pixel icons for an authentic mid-1980s desktop look.
- Early Web Vernacular Pairs well · Low-resolution type and layered layouts carry naturally into table-based web pages and GIF graphics.
- Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type) Pairs well · Both are type-led laboratories that publish their own magazine as a showcase for their fonts. In Zone Mixte (2022) êkhô studio chose BBB Baskervvol with Baskerville's erasure of Sarah Eaves in mind, the story Zuzana Licko honoured in Mrs Eaves (1996); set a Baskervvol text in an Emigre-style specimen spread to join the two foundry experiments.
- Phototype Expressive Typography (Lubalin & U&lc) Contrasts · Both were made by a new type technology; Emigre's bitmap and PostScript faces end the phototype era, so set a Lubalin ligature against a coarse bitmap word to show how the tool shapes the letter.
- South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi) Contrasts · 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.
- Cranbrook & Deconstructivist Typography Pairs well · Emigre published Cranbrook work; set layered Cranbrook-style spreads in Emigre's early digital typefaces.
With Neo-Swiss Revival
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print neo-Swiss posters in two riso spot inks to add grain and warmth to a strict grid.
- Acid Graphics / New Ugly Contrasts · Acid graphics' chrome chaos is the opposite pole; one liquid-metal element can puncture a too-polite grid.
- Brutalist Web Design Pairs well · Expose neo-Swiss grids with raw HTML defaults and visible borders for a stripped, contemporary web voice.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Contrasts · Victorian wood-type eclecticism is the history Swiss typography rejected; a single wood-type headline can warm a cold grid.
- Seoul Independent Graphic Design (Small-Studio Scene) Contrasts · The Seoul studios share Neo-Swiss's Dutch and Swiss roots (Mevis & Van Deursen, Jude Kang's studies in Switzerland, Favorit Hangul extending the Swiss foundry Dinamo's Favorit), but Neo-Swiss sets one Latin grotesque flush left on a modular grid, while the Seoul studios centre their text, repeat circles and letters as objects, and make Hangul, reshaped and set beside Latin, the main material.
- Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism Contrasts · The atlas's nearest genome: both blow a grotesque up to fill the format on a white ground with one signal colour, but Swiss revival locks it to a modular grid, flush left, in one neo-grotesque; Blue Note crops and tints a documentary photograph, mixes in Ultra Bodoni and Clarendon, and squeezes, warps and runs words off the edge by eye. Choose Blue Note when the type should swing rather than align.
- Lucerne Poster Scene (Neubad & Südpol Posters) Contrasts · Neo-Swiss keeps the grotesque intact on a modular grid for identities and the web; Lucerne keeps the grotesque only for the small print and distorts the title itself, poster by poster. Choose neo-Swiss for a system, Lucerne for a one-off event.
- Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography Pairs well · Borrow New Wave's letterspacing and stepped lines to make a contemporary neo-Swiss grid feel alive.