Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves × Jamaican Dancehall Signs

Shares community-facing hand lettering and star billing; use for sound-system scenes in another city.

From the research on Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

Mix them and make something Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves Jamaican Dancehall Signs

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves, their arrangement from Jamaican Dancehall Signs, the finish from Jamaican Dancehall Signs. 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.

Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves Jamaican Dancehall Signs & Sleeve Art

Type from Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves: Hand-lettering
Ornamented display
Colour from Jamaican Dancehall Signs: Full polychrome
Complementary clash
Form from Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves: Distortion & exaggeration
Naturalistic depiction
Composition from Jamaican Dancehall Signs: Extreme scale contrast
Layered information
Surface from Jamaican Dancehall Signs: Hard offset shadow
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

Square

Agbalumo; Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves used Hand-drawn outlined block lettering and Pop-era display faces

Text · Jamaican Dancehall Signs

The street graphics of Jamaica's dancehall era. One-off hand-painted signs, nailed to light poles and trees, announce sound-system dances and clashes, with sound-system and artist names stacked in bold, bright letters. On record sleeves, Wilfred Limonious's crowded comic caricatures gave the music its face. Both are ephemeral and topical: the signs are mostly unsigned, rarely dated and burned as litter once the dance is over.

Archivo; Jamaican Dancehall Signs used Hand-painted block and outlined capitals with drop shadows and Wilfred Limonious's hand-drawn cartoon titling and speech balloons

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Jamaican Dancehall Signs, with a counter-accent from Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves Jamaican Dancehall Signs & Sleeve Art

#ffd400 ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#e3241b accent · 18%
#1d5fd0 accent · 14%
#1b4fa0 accent · 10%
#ff4f9a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffd400;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #e3241b;
  --accent-2: #1d5fd0;
  --accent-3: #1b4fa0;
  --accent-4: #ff4f9a;
  --font-display: "Agbalumo", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

The two styles

A smiling singer in a bright red jacket reaches toward the viewer beside a vintage microphone, surrounded by musicians playing trumpet, upright bass and congas and a woman dancing in red. Huge red and yellow lettering reading “EL SONERO” fills the top above a colorful backdrop of stars, palms, city buildings and a suspension bridge.

1964–1985 · Latin America & Caribbean, North America Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves The cover language of New York's salsa boom: a record label's sleeves sold a scene and a roster of stars with inked and illustrated bandleader portraits alongside studio photography, comic-strip gags, mugshot and crowd montage, and chunky outlined hand-lettered titles. Crowded, frontal and saturated, with in-group humour, it spoke to a Nuyorican and Caribbean audience in its own pop idiom. The Wanted and mugshot jokes were played by the community's own artists and musicians on stereotypes about Latinos; the idiom should not be reduced to ethnic iconography.

A brightly painted sign reads “BASSWAR” in enormous yellow letters above “RUMBLE VS UPRISING,” with the date, venue and admission price along the bottom. Red, green, blue and pink lightning bolts and jagged starbursts fill the spaces around the thick, shadowed lettering.

1980–present · Latin America & Caribbean Jamaican Dancehall Signs & Sleeve Art The street graphics of Jamaica's dancehall era. One-off hand-painted signs, nailed to light poles and trees, announce sound-system dances and clashes, with sound-system and artist names stacked in bold, bright letters. On record sleeves, Wilfred Limonious's crowded comic caricatures gave the music its face. Both are ephemeral and topical: the signs are mostly unsigned, rarely dated and burned as litter once the dance is over.

More combinations

With Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves

With Jamaican Dancehall Signs

Every style combination