Style combination · Pairs well

Finnish Bold Print × 10-gruppen Printed Textiles

Mix a large organic Marimekko shape with a mid-sized pictorial 10-gruppen repeat for a Nordic interior that is bold at two scales.

From the research on 10-gruppen (Tiogruppen) Printed Textiles

Mix them and make something Finnish Bold Print 10-gruppen Printed Textiles

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from 10-gruppen Printed Textiles, their arrangement from Finnish Bold Print, the finish from Finnish Bold Print. 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.

Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism) 10-gruppen (Tiogruppen) Printed Textiles

Type from Finnish Bold Print
Colour from 10-gruppen Printed Textiles: Flat fields
Limited spot colours
Form from 10-gruppen Printed Textiles: Stylised figuration
Rectilinear
Composition from Finnish Bold Print: All-over field
Repetition & rhythm
Surface from Finnish Bold Print: Painterly brushwork
Flat

10-gruppen Printed Textiles avoids painterly brushwork: this is where the two pull against each other.

The type

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

Display · Finnish Bold Print

Wow

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 · 10-gruppen Printed Textiles

The printed fabrics of 10-gruppen, a Stockholm collective of ten textile designers founded in 1970: bright, flat all-over repeats of stripes, checks, dripping drops and simple figurative motifs such as dogs, bananas and Stockholm landmarks, in a few saturated inks on cotton or linen. Against the discreet patterns then usual in Swedish textiles, they made cheap, cheerful pattern for everyday goods, sold by the metre at IKEA and on bags and trays in the group's own shop. Unlike Marimekko's large organic shapes, the repeats are mid-sized, cleanly drawn and often pictorial.

Nunito; 10-gruppen Printed Textiles used No lettering in the repeat and IKEA's capitalised Swedish product names (STRIX/STRAX, PLASK, SOLREGN, RANDIG BANAN, as IKEA Museum writes them), the form in which most buyers met the group's prints; this naming is IKEA's convention, not a choice of the group, and the only lettering tied to the prints in the sources

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from 10-gruppen Printed Textiles, with a counter-accent from Finnish Bold Print. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Finnish Bold Print (Marimekko Modernism) 10-gruppen (Tiogruppen) Printed Textiles

#f4f1e8 ground · 36%
#161616 ink · 14%
#f6c800 accent · 18%
#ef7d1a accent · 14%
#d4211c accent · 10%
#1f5fbf accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f1e8;
  --ink: #161616;
  --accent-1: #f6c800;
  --accent-2: #ef7d1a;
  --accent-3: #d4211c;
  --accent-4: #1f5fbf;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Nunito", 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.