Style combination · Pairs well

Hand-Painted Signage × Tiki Pop

Have a sign writer paint the bar's name in brush script and shaded bamboo capitals on weathered boards, so the lettering is made by hand rather than taken from a tiki font.

From the research on Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop)

Mix them and make something Hand-Painted Signage Tiki Pop

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Tiki Pop, their arrangement from Hand-Painted Signage, 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 Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop)

Type from Tiki Pop: Hand-lettering
Ornamented display
Colour from Tiki Pop: Earth & mineral
Dark ground
Form from Tiki Pop: Stylised figuration
Folk & sacred symbols
Composition from Hand-Painted Signage: Central symmetry
Framed panels
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 · Tiki Pop

Wow

Yellowtail, standing in for Casual brush script for venue names, as on the Waikiki Room menu at the Pick-Nicollet Hotel

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 Tiki Pop, with a counter-accent from Hand-Painted Signage. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop)

#1a1612 ground · 36%
#f0e2c3 ink · 14%
#d9622b accent · 18%
#c99a2e accent · 14%
#2a9d8f accent · 10%
#b8262b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #1a1612;
  --ink: #f0e2c3;
  --accent-1: #d9622b;
  --accent-2: #c99a2e;
  --accent-3: #2a9d8f;
  --accent-4: #b8262b;
  --font-display: "Yellowtail", cursive;
  --font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop): Tiki Pop is an outsider's pastiche built from sacred things: Polynesian wood images such as a Mangarevan tiki were carved to hold the mana of deities and stood on marae, and Hawaiian ki'i, Māori and Marquesan tiki belong to particular peoples, yet the style fused them into one grinning bar mascot and paired it with topless 'wahine' and 'savage' jokes, which Pacific artists such as Dan Taulapapa McMullin ('Tiki Manifesto') describe as erasure. Quote it as mid-century American commercial design, not as Polynesian art: invent your own non-sacred mascot rather than copying a named deity or museum carving, drop the sexualised island women and 'cannibal' caricature, do not use tā moko or Hawaiian words as decoration, and commission Pacific Islander artists when the subject is the Pacific itself.