Style combination · Contrasts
Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern × Finnish Bold Print
Same decade, same screen-printed furnishing cloth, but Marimekko fills one huge silhouette where Day scatters small shapes on thin lines; compare to see what scale does to a repeat.
Mix them and make something Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern Finnish Bold Print
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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.
Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern (Lucienne Day and the Festival Pattern Group) Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism)
- Type from Finnish Bold Print
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- Colour from Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern
- Form from Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern
- Composition from Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern
- Surface from Finnish Bold Print
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The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Finnish Bold Print
Hello
Inter Tight; Finnish Bold Print used The Marimekko wordmark (in use since 1954) and Selvedge inscriptions repeated along the edge of the cloth, naming designer, pattern, maker, country and year
Text · Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern
The post-war British pattern language launched at the 1951 Festival of Britain. Lucienne Day's 'Calyx' for Heal's replaced the revived Victorian floral with spindly lines linking small cup and seedpod shapes, after Klee, Miró and Calder, while the Festival Pattern Group turned X-ray crystal-structure diagrams into wallpapers, dress fabrics and furnishings. Screen-printed in a few flat inks on olive, ochre or white grounds, it set the light 'Contemporary' look of British homes through the 1950s; in the 1960s Day turned to brighter colours and simpler forms.
Jost; Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern used Festival display lettering used alongside the patterns (posters, catalogues, signs), not in the repeats and Festival display lettering used alongside the patterns, not in the repeats
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern, with a counter-accent from Finnish Bold Print. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern (Lucienne Day and the Festival Pattern Group) Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism)
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#f1ece0ground · 36% -
#1b1a17ink · 14% -
#d4532aaccent · 18% -
#ef7d1aaccent · 14% -
#e6cf3eaccent · 10% -
#d4211caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f1ece0;
--ink: #1b1a17;
--accent-1: #d4532a;
--accent-2: #ef7d1a;
--accent-3: #e6cf3e;
--accent-4: #d4211c;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism): Many of the best-known patterns, Unikko and Kivet among them, are still produced by Marimekko and remain protected designs, so work in the manner rather than copying them. Folk sources carry two further, separate risks. Anonymous folk ornament can be living devotional material: the käspaikka, the Karelian linen towel named in Isola's 1959 print, is still used to dress icons in Orthodox churches and homes, so abstract such ornament rather than quote it, and keep it out of contexts that trivialise it. A named folk artist's work is authored, not a shared tradition: in 2013 Kristina Isola admitted that her 'Metsänväki' (2007), by then painted on a Finnair aircraft, copied elements of Maria Prymachenko's 1963 painting 'Rat on a Journey'; Finnair undertook to repaint the plane and Marimekko ended its collaboration with Kristina Isola in September 2013.
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The two styles
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More combinations
With Festival of Britain 'Contemporary' Pattern
- UPA & Cartoon Modern Pairs well · Both draw a spindly, child-like modern line in flat colour; put a UPA figure in front of a Contemporary repeat for a full 1950s scene.
- Thaw Modernism (Soviet and Czechoslovak) Pairs well · Thaw graphics share the light utopian line and flat pastel shapes; its stylised figures and stars give the repeat a narrative accent.
- Googie & Atomic Age Contrasts · Both are atomic-age optimism, but Googie shouts from roadside signs in neon and boomerangs while this stays a quiet domestic pattern in earth tones.
- Surrealist Graphics Pairs well · Borrow a Miró-like biomorphic blob or floating sign to push a Contemporary repeat further toward painting.
- NK Textilkammare Geometric Print (Astrid Sampe, Signerad Textil) Pairs well · The British contemporary prints of the same years share screen-printed, all-over repeats in limited flat colour; borrow their spindly drawn line for a lighter variant of a ruled NK stripe.
With Finnish Bold Print
- African Wax & Fancy Print Contrasts · Both are industrially printed cotton that dresses bodies and rooms, but wax print crowds the cloth with misregistered emblems that traders and wearers name after proverbs and events, while Marimekko enlarges one shape on open white under a title its designer gives; compare them when a pattern must speak or simply be bold.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Pairs well · Japanese postwar emblematic colour fields share the reduction of nature to a few flat silhouettes, and two of Marimekko's leading designers, Katsuji Wakisaka and Fujiwo Ishimoto, came from Japan; pair one Japanese-style emblem with a Marimekko-scale repeat for a calm, nature-led identity.
- Op Art Graphics Contrasts · Both fill a field edge to edge with one repeated module in the 1960s, but op art's ruled precision makes the eye vibrate while Finnish bold print keeps hand-cut edges and calm flat shapes; choose between perceptual shock and relaxed joy.
- Scandinavian Functionalism Pairs well · The same Nordic ideal of good everyday things, turned up loud; set one Marimekko-scale print against a calm funkis layout with a light ground and a plain sans so the pattern carries all the colour.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Contemporaries in saturated flat colour at a giant scale; borrow pop's isolated, enlarged object for a poster, but drop its halftone and irony to keep Marimekko's sincerity.
- Norwegian and Finnish National Romantic Graphics (Munthe & Karelianism) Contrasts · Later Finnish flat printing abstracts into large repeat patterns what this style still draws as myth figures; put a Kalevala frieze against a bold abstract field to show the shift.
- NK Textilkammare Geometric Print (Astrid Sampe, Signerad Textil) Contrasts · Marimekko enlarges one hand-cut or brushed motif to a huge repeat with a deliberately wobbly edge; NK's geometric strand keeps small, ruled units on a black-and-white base. Set one against the other to show scale against restraint.
- Book Blob (Abstract Colour-Blob Literary Fiction Cover) Pairs well · Marimekko's big organic shapes in flat, saturated colour, printed edge to edge, are a crisp, hard-edged cousin of the blob's soft fields. Borrow their scale and confident cut edges when blurred blobs feel too vague.