Style combination · Pairs well
Extinction Rebellion Graphics × Stencil Street Art
ESP spread the symbol as a street artist before XR adopted it, chalking it on Brick Lane and putting up posters and tiles around East London; pair XR's one-colour emblem and short slogans with stencil street art's hard-edged sprayed figures for walls and pavements.
Mix them and make something Extinction Rebellion Graphics Stencil Street Art
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.
Extinction Rebellion Graphics Stencil Street Art
- Type from Extinction Rebellion Graphics
- Colour from Stencil Street Art
- Form from Extinction Rebellion Graphics
- Composition from Stencil Street Art
- Surface from Extinction Rebellion Graphics
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Extinction Rebellion Graphics
Noise
Alfa Slab One, standing in for FUCXED Caps (drawn by Clive Russell of This Ain't Rock'n'Roll from an old woodcut-style wood type he found on eBay, deliberately slightly wonky; XR's headline print face, download file FUCXED v4; FUCXED Latin is recommended for online graphics)
Text · Stencil Street Art
Pictures cut rather than drawn: a photograph is reduced to two or three flat tones, cut into card and sprayed onto a wall, usually uninvited, so one hard-edged figure appears in the street, in black with at most one accent colour. Foreshadowed by Ernest Pignon-Ernest's Hiroshima silhouettes (1966), it took shape in 1978 in Amsterdam's punk scene (Hugo Kaagman) and São Paulo (Alex Vallauri), was taken up in Paris by Blek le Rat in the early 1980s, and went global after 2000 with Banksy's satirical stencils and Shepard Fairey's Obey posters and Obama 'Hope' portrait.
Special Elite; Stencil Street Art used Hand-cut stencil capitals, bridged where the counters would otherwise fall out and Industrial and military marking stencils
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Stencil Street Art, with a counter-accent from Extinction Rebellion Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Extinction Rebellion Graphics Stencil Street Art
-
#e6e2d8ground · 36% -
#111111ink · 14% -
#d3212daccent · 18% -
#c80082accent · 14% -
#1f3a4daccent · 10% -
#14aa37accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e6e2d8;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #d3212d;
--accent-2: #c80082;
--accent-3: #1f3a4d;
--accent-4: #14aa37;
--font-display: "Alfa Slab One", serif;
--font-text: "Special Elite", monospace;
}Use it with care
Extinction Rebellion Graphics: Extinction Rebellion is a living movement and the Extinction Symbol is credited to the artist ESP, who lends it to XR only for non-commercial use; XR says it will pursue anyone selling merchandise with it. Do not put the symbol, the XR logotype or a close imitation of the kit on products, fundraising, advertising or brand campaigns, and do not dress a company's climate message in XR's look to borrow its credibility.
Stencil Street Art: Spraying a wall without the owner's consent is vandalism or criminal damage in most jurisdictions, so get permission or a legal wall; a brand faking street stencils is no exception (IBM's 2001 'Peace, Love, and Linux' sidewalk stencils led to arrests and more than US$120,000 in fines). Most stencils start from someone else's photograph, as the AP's dispute over Fairey's Hope poster showed (settled 2011): shoot or license the source image, and do not pass off a pastiche as a Banksy, whose work is authenticated only by Pest Control. Do not use photographs of real victims, or places of real suffering such as separation walls and war ruins, as props for a brand or a joke; by Banksy's own account, a Palestinian man at the West Bank barrier told him they did not want the wall made beautiful.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Extinction Rebellion Graphics
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · The twelve bright colours were influenced by Eduardo Paolozzi; push a slogan poster further towards British Pop with fluorescent flat grounds and one playful image.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Pairs well · FUCXED imitates old wood type and Burrill printed XR slogans from real wood type; pair the bright XR grounds with a jobbing printer's condensed wood letters for a hand-set protest poster.
- South African Resistance Poster Pairs well · Both are cheap workshop prints with heavy capitals and an organisation's emblem; XR adds a centrally specified twelve-colour kit where the struggle posters kept to one to three hand-cut inks.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · XR borrows a corporate identity's tools (one symbol, a fixed logotype, a colour palette, a design guide) and turns them into a free, hand-printed kit that bans commercial use.
- Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics Pairs well · A later movement that also lives on one simple mark anyone can copy by hand; pair a single shared emblem with locally made, cheaply printed posters to keep a campaign recognisable without central design.
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Pairs well · A later movement that again reduces its cause to one emblem and a fixed set of slogans in heavy capitals; pair XR's flat colour grounds with ACT UP's facts in small print when a protest poster must both rally and inform.
- Belarusian Protest Illustration (2020 Uprising) Contrasts · Compare a prescribed wood-type and woodcut identity with an illustrator-led shared vocabulary: Belarusian examples do not require XR's oversized headline, carved texture, print workshop or fixed logo. Shared protest tone and few-colour printing are not evidence of descent.
- Solarpunk Contrasts · Both answer the climate crisis: XR shouts alarm in woodcut and flat spot colour; solarpunk paints the hopeful world after it. Pair them for campaigns that move from warning to vision.
With Stencil Street Art
- Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Contrasts · Both use spray paint in the street, but graffiti makes the writer's name a freehand, many-coloured letter-sculpture with 3D blocks and fades; stencil art sprays a reproducible photographic picture in black. Decide which one the brief needs before mixing them.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Stencil art borrows the repetition and reach of branding to mock it, as OBEY parodies advertising; a black figure sprayed beside a clean corporate mark makes the question of who owns public space visible.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Stencilling grew out of punk (Kaagman's fanzine scene, Crass's Underground slogans); pair a sprayed figure with xerox collage and ransom-note lettering for a flyer or sleeve with the same anti-authority edge.
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Fairey's Obey posters borrow Soviet propaganda's red, black and cream and its heroic portrait; give a stencilled face a red bar and a one-word slogan for agitprop with a knowing twist.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Both repeat an appropriated photograph through a stencil; add Pop's serial grid or one off-register accent colour to turn a single street figure into a print edition.
- Lambe-Lambe Posters (Brazilian Paste-Up Street Posters) Pairs well · Both descend from or sit beside graffiti culture in the street; pair a pasted series with a painted element only where a project needs both.
- Chinese Paper-Cut (Jianzhi) Pairs well · Both depend on bridges that hold every island of the design to the sheet; give a spray stencil the paper-cut's folded symmetry and saw-tooth texture.
- BUGA UP Billboard Alteration Contrasts · Stencils bring their own imagery to the wall; BUGA UP takes the wall's existing imagery and turns it.