Style combination · Pairs well

Hand-Painted Signage × South African Vernacular Design

Ijusi quotes the sign writer's drop-shadowed capitals; commission a working sign painter for the headline and collage it with photographs instead of faking the brush in vector.

From the research on South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

Mix them and make something Hand-Painted Signage South African Vernacular Design

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Hand-Painted Signage, their arrangement from South African Vernacular Design, the finish from Hand-Painted Signage. 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.

Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

Type from South African Vernacular Design: Hand-lettering
Eclectic mixing
Colour from Hand-Painted Signage: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Hand-Painted Signage: Borders & frames
Restrained accents
Composition from South African Vernacular Design: Collage & layering
Dynamic asymmetry
Surface from Hand-Painted Signage: Hard offset shadow
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · South African Vernacular Design

Ours

Sedgwick Ave Display, standing in for Son of Sam (Garth Walker, 2003–04), the Constitutional Court's unicase display face, named after the cell graffiti 'son of sam now son of hope' and built from prison-cell graffiti, a judge's handwriting and site lettering, with numerals after the stencilled cell numbers

Text · Hand-Painted Signage

Letters painted by trained sign writers on fascias, windows, walls, vehicles and showcards, from Victorian gold leaf on glass to Mexican rótulos, Indian bazaar boards and Ghanaian barbershop signs. Brush-built letters with shading, drop shadows and outlines are fitted to the panel and mixed in a few styles for hierarchy, valuing legibility at a distance and the painter's flourish; vinyl displaced the craft in the 1980s and it has revived since the 2010s.

Oswald; Hand-Painted Signage used One-stroke casual (showcard) alphabet and Block and Egyptian sign writers' letters

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Hand-Painted Signage, with a counter-accent from South African Vernacular Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi)

#f1e6cc ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#c99a2e accent · 18%
#ffb612 accent · 14%
#b8262b accent · 10%
#f26c28 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1e6cc;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #c99a2e;
  --accent-2: #ffb612;
  --accent-3: #b8262b;
  --accent-4: #f26c28;
  --font-display: "Sedgwick Ave Display", cursive;
  --font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi): Ijusi's raw material is the work of living people: township sign painters, hair-salon and funeral-parlour sign makers, Zulu beadworkers and wire crafters. The Constitutional Court's typeface also quotes cell graffiti from the Old Fort, whose prisons held activists such as Mandela and Sobukwe and scores of ordinary Black South Africans jailed under the pass laws. Eye's reviewer, who judged Walker's efforts sincere, warned that anyone expecting Black design in i-jusi would find 'very little of it'. Credit and pay the makers whose lettering and craft you quote, commission them where you can, and do not reduce township design to a 'gritty African' texture for a brand with no stake in those streets. The comics issues featured Bitterkomix co-founder Anton Kannemeyer, criticised for 'offensive, racist imagery' in satires such as Pappa in Afrika, which recasts Hergé's Tintin as a white African; do not generate racial caricature outside that authorship and context. Son of Sam was commissioned for the Court's exclusive use.

The two styles

An ornate rectangular sign reads “RIVER MARKET” in large cream-and-gold capital letters on a dark green background, with red shadows on the top word and blue shadows below. Gold borders and scrolling flourishes surround the lettering, with red decorative motifs in the black corners and visible painted texture throughout.

1800–present · Global / networked Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Letters painted by trained sign writers on fascias, windows, walls, vehicles and showcards, from Victorian gold leaf on glass to Mexican rótulos, Indian bazaar boards and Ghanaian barbershop signs. Brush-built letters with shading, drop shadows and outlines are fitted to the panel and mixed in a few styles for hierarchy, valuing legibility at a distance and the painter's flourish; vinyl displaced the craft in the 1980s and it has revived since the 2010s. 1995–present · Sub-Saharan Africa South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi) A post-apartheid design language launched in Durban in 1995 by Garth Walker's Orange Juice Design and its free, experimental magazine Ijusi (isiZulu for 'juice'), which asked 'What makes me South African, and what does that look like?'. Trained designers turned from the clean corporate European look to the street: drop-shadowed sign lettering, hair-salon boards, packaging, beadwork and prison graffiti, collaged into many-typeface pages and new fonts such as Son of Sam for the Constitutional Court (2004).