Style combination · Contrasts

Global Village Coffeehouse × Minimalist Graphic Design

Dwell records independent cafés rejecting burlap coffee sacks and aroma swirls and moving 'toward minimalism'; set GVC's terracotta and woodcut against that bare restraint to show how café design turned away from it.

From the research on Global Village Coffeehouse

Mix them and make something Global Village Coffeehouse Minimalist Graphic Design

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Global Village Coffeehouse, their arrangement from Minimalist Graphic Design, the finish from Global Village Coffeehouse. 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.

Global Village Coffeehouse Minimalist Graphic Design

Type from Minimalist Graphic Design: Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Wide letterspacing

Global Village Coffeehouse avoids grotesque & neo-grotesque: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Colour from Global Village Coffeehouse: Earth & mineral
Analogous harmony
Form from Global Village Coffeehouse: Stylised figuration
Cosmic & celestial
Composition from Minimalist Graphic Design: Isolated object
Generous white space

Global Village Coffeehouse avoids generous white space: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Surface from Global Village Coffeehouse: Carved line
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Minimalist Graphic Design

Calm

Inter Tight, standing in for Helvetica Neue (light weights)

Text · Global Village Coffeehouse

The faux-naive, earth-toned illustration style that late-1980s American designers set against Memphis, and that chain cafés, bookstores, packaging and clip art spread through the 1990s. Rough woodcut- and scratchboard-like line shows suns and moons, spirals, hands, eyes, globes, ships, flowing figures and coffee cups with 'aroma swirls' over mottled earth-toned grounds. Trading Memphis brights and metallic foil for textured paper and twine, it sold handmade warmth and 'global village' unity. The name arose in CARI's online group in 2017; Evan Collins set the style out in a 2018 Are.na essay.

Jost; Global Village Coffeehouse used Mondõ Kaizen (Don Synstelien, SynFonts; on MyFonts since 2001), the font Evan Collins links from his phrase 'countless 1990s font packs' in the passage on neo-hieroglyphics (Are.na, 2018) and Neo-hieroglyphic and pictograph dingbat and display fonts from 1990s font packs, which Collins reads as a bid for a more 'universal language' (Are.na, 2018)

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Global Village Coffeehouse, with a counter-accent from Minimalist Graphic Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Global Village Coffeehouse Minimalist Graphic Design

#efe2c6 ground · 36%
#3b2a20 ink · 14%
#d19a35 accent · 18%
#8c8a86 accent · 14%
#b4532a accent · 10%
#8c6a3f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe2c6;
  --ink: #3b2a20;
  --accent-1: #d19a35;
  --accent-2: #8c8a86;
  --accent-3: #b4532a;
  --accent-4: #8c6a3f;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Global Village Coffeehouse: The style borrowed ancient and Indigenous imagery as generic primitivism: Collins records kokopelli figures and 'tribal' and hieroglyph-like icons, at times showing 'tribal' figures carrying executives or serving coffee, and Dwell notes vaguely African masks on café walls; kokopelli is a fertility deity of the Hopi, Zuni and other Southwestern peoples. Draw suns, spirals, cups, plants and invented figures instead, leave out kokopelli, masks and other specific peoples' sacred figures, and never show non-Western people as servants or as an exotic backdrop for a product.