Stylogeny combining Finnish Symbol Poster × Japanese Postwar Modernism

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Style combination · Pairs well

Finnish Symbol Poster × Japanese Postwar Modernism

Both reduce a poster to one emblem on empty ground; add the Japanese abstraction and calm to the Finnish animal and pun for a cooler sign.

From the research on Finnish Symbol Poster (the 'Finnish School', 1954–1995)

Mix them and make something Finnish Symbol Poster Japanese Postwar Modernism

HelloFinnish Symbol Poster × Japanese Postwar
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Finnish Symbol Poster, their arrangement from Finnish Symbol Poster, the finish from Finnish Symbol Poster. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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 Symbol Poster (the 'Finnish School', 1954–1995) Japanese Postwar Modernism

Type from Japanese Postwar Modernism
Colour from Japanese Postwar Modernism
Form from Finnish Symbol Poster
Composition from Finnish Symbol Poster
Surface from Finnish Symbol Poster

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The type

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

Display · Japanese Postwar Modernism

Hello

Zen Kaku Gothic New, standing in for Gothic (kaku gothic Japanese sans)

Text · Finnish Symbol Poster

Finnish poster and symbol design, 1950s to 1990s, in which one reduced picture, often an animal, an object or a visual pun, carries the whole message on an empty ground. Varis aimed for posters with no text; his were called sign-like and visually reduced. Dry humour (Bruun's tongue-in-cheek Finnair salmon, 1958) sits beside a love of Finnish nature. Unlike its parent it also campaigns: the social posters of the 1960s–70s, Varis's Your Lifemeter (1970), Piippo's Ruanda (1994). The same makers drew national logos; Mykkänen's book covers are a typographic side strand.

Inter; Finnish Symbol Poster used No type at all and Slab-serif capitals in Bruun's The Salmon Flight (1958)

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Japanese Postwar Modernism, with a counter-accent from Finnish Symbol Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Finnish Symbol Poster (the 'Finnish School', 1954–1995) Japanese Postwar Modernism

  • #f4f1ea ground · 36%
  • #111111 ink · 14%
  • #d7261e accent · 18%
  • #ee8a1d accent · 14%
  • #c8a24a accent · 10%
  • #1d3c78 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f1ea;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #d7261e;
  --accent-2: #ee8a1d;
  --accent-3: #c8a24a;
  --accent-4: #1d3c78;
  --font-display: "Zen Kaku Gothic New", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

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The two styles

A large red silhouette of a moose facing right fills most of a cream background, with broad branching antlers and a small cream eye. The word “NORTH” appears in large blue capital letters at the upper left. 1954–1995 · Northern Europe Finnish Symbol Poster (the 'Finnish School', 1954–1995) Finnish poster and symbol design, 1950s to 1990s, in which one reduced picture, often an animal, an object or a visual pun, carries the whole message on an empty ground. Varis aimed for posters with no text; his were called sign-like and visually reduced. Dry humour (Bruun's tongue-in-cheek Finnair salmon, 1958) sits beside a love of Finnish nature. Unlike its parent it also campaigns: the social posters of the 1960s–70s, Varis's Your Lifemeter (1970), Piippo's Ruanda (1994). The same makers drew national logos; Mykkänen's book covers are a typographic side strand. A large red sun sits above and behind a black triangular mountain with a gold tip on an off-white background. Bold black characters reading “太陽” appear in the upper-left corner. 1950–1990 · East Asia Japanese Postwar Modernism Building on the New Typography that Hiromu Hara and the Nippon Kobo circle had absorbed in the 1930s, Japan's postwar graphic designers fused the grid, sans-serif and objective photography of European modernism with indigenous traditions of family crests (kamon), asymmetry and charged emptiness (ma). From the Graphic '55 exhibition and the Nippon Design Center to Yusaku Kamekura's Tokyo 1964 Olympic posters, it produced bold emblematic symbols, luminous flat colour fields and photography of startling precision.

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