Style combination · Pairs well
Finnish Bold Print × Moomin Graphics
The other Finnish everyday-design export: set a single Moomin line drawing beside a large flat Marimekko-style repeat for a Nordic home range.
Mix them and make something Finnish Bold Print Moomin Graphics
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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.
Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism) Moomin Graphics (Tove Jansson's Pen-Drawn World and its Licensed Afterlife)
- Type from Moomin Graphics
- Colour from Finnish Bold Print
- Form from Moomin Graphics
- Composition from Finnish Bold Print
- 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 · Moomin Graphics
Home
Comic Neue, standing in for Hand-lettering in speech balloons and captions, the newspaper comic-strip tradition
Text · Finnish Bold Print
The printed-cotton modernism of Marimekko, founded in Helsinki in 1951 by Armi and Viljo Ratia out of Viljo's printing firm Printex. Its designers, chiefly Maija Isola, the first (1949-1987), with Vuokko Nurmesniemi (1953-1960) and from 1960 Annika Rimala, painted or cut one motif (stones, a poppy, waves, stripes), enlarged it to repeats often over half a metre and screen-printed it edge to edge in a few flat inks, often on white. It turns the Nordic ideal of good everyday things into one pattern for dress, curtain and home; from 1974 Fujiwo Ishimoto added brushstroke and calligraphic marks.
Inter; 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
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Finnish Bold Print, with a counter-accent from Moomin Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism) Moomin Graphics (Tove Jansson's Pen-Drawn World and its Licensed Afterlife)
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#f7f5f0ground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#ef7d1aaccent · 18% -
#d2483aaccent · 14% -
#d4211caccent · 10% -
#e6c26aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f7f5f0;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #ef7d1a;
--accent-2: #d2483a;
--accent-3: #d4211c;
--accent-4: #e6c26a;
--font-display: "Comic Neue", cursive;
--font-text: "Inter", 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.
Moomin Graphics (Tove Jansson's Pen-Drawn World and its Licensed Afterlife): The Moomin characters, names and drawings are protected and licensed by the Jansson family's company; use the drawing approach (fine ink line, round figures, hatched landscape, one or two soft colours) rather than copying the characters or implying an official Moomin product.
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The two styles
05
More combinations
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.
With Moomin Graphics
- Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich) Contrasts · Jansson drew political satire for the Finland-Swedish magazine Garm in the broad European satirical-magazine tradition that Simplicissimus led; Moomin keeps a sure pen line but drops the upward-aimed attack and the grotesque body for round, gentle figures.
- Scandinavian Functionalism Pairs well · The Teema mug is the meeting point: a plain functional Nordic shape carrying one warm hand drawing.
- Kawaii Design Contrasts · Its round, white characters sit near kawaii fancy goods, but they keep a hatched, melancholy world around them that kawaii fancy goods leave out.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Both close figures in a clean contour, but the clear line refuses hatching and fills with flat colour, while Moomin hatches its landscapes and lives in black and white.