Style combination · Pairs well
Hauntology × London Transport Design
Borrow the logic of a public-service programme (fixed elements, a roundel, varied pictures within one system) to give an invented hauntological institution a believable house style.
Mix them and make something Hauntology London Transport Design
01
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.
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design London Transport Design
- Type from London Transport Design
- Colour from Hauntology
- Form from London Transport Design
- Composition from Hauntology
- Surface from Hauntology
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · London Transport Design
Atlas
Fira Sans, standing in for Edward Johnston's Underground sans (1916): two weights, ordinary and a capitals-only bold, with capitals on Roman square-capital proportions and diagonally set square dots on i and j; condensed letters followed for bus destination displays
Text · Hauntology
Sleeves and print that rebuild a misremembered British past from the public graphics of roughly 1958–1978. At Ghost Box, founded in London in 2004, Julian House gave every release one template after the Penguin paperback grid and library-music LPs: bold grotesque type in a ruled Penguin-style band over a single saturated colour field and an eerie collage of textbook, science and occult imagery. Reynolds and Fisher called it hauntology; Richard Littler's Scarfolk turned it into sinister public-information posters.
Archivo; Hauntology used Monotype Grotesque (MT Grotesque), the main face of the Ghost Box front covers, chosen over Helvetica and Clarendon (Bitstream's cut) on Ghost Box back covers and booklets
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Hauntology, with a counter-accent from London Transport Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design London Transport Design
-
#efe9d8ground · 36% -
#1e1b18ink · 14% -
#f9a61aaccent · 18% -
#d0352baccent · 14% -
#01b2deaccent · 10% -
#d9a441accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe9d8;
--ink: #1e1b18;
--accent-1: #f9a61a;
--accent-2: #d0352b;
--accent-3: #01b2de;
--accent-4: #d9a441;
--font-display: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design: The Ghost Box sleeves and logo, Littler's Scarfolk images and Frances Castle's Clay Pipe sleeves are in copyright, and much of what they imitate (Penguin covers, government public information posters, textbook illustrations, archive photographs) has its own rights holders: build a new fictional institution from public-domain or licensed material rather than copying a Ghost Box sleeve or Penguin's trade dress.
London Transport Design: The roundel is a registered trade mark of Transport for London, which licenses it: draw your own emblem rather than reproducing it. New Johnston, used exclusively by TfL, and its 2016 successor Johnston100, which TfL commissioned from Monotype, are TfL's corporate typefaces; Johnston's 1916 design has been out of copyright since 2015, and for the historic letter use P22 Underground, the revival the London Transport Museum licensed to P22, or another humanist sans, not TfL's fonts. Some commissions served empire, such as Bawden's poster for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, which the V&A describes as imperial propaganda that included human displays; do not reuse that imagery as neutral nostalgia.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Hauntology
- Surrealist Graphics Pairs well · House named Max Ernst among his influences: add an Ernst-like collage juxtaposition to a textbook photograph to make an educational image turn eerie.
- Vaporwave Contrasts · Both build nostalgia from found media, but vaporwave mourns consumer electronics in neon pastels on screens while hauntology misremembers public, educational print in flat offset colour on paper; choose which lost future a design should haunt.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Contrasts · House names Peter Saville among his influences, but Saville's Factory sleeves quote one modernist or classical source per record, while Ghost Box invents a whole institution and dresses every release in its one template; choose a single quotation or a fictional series.
- Neo-Swiss Revival Contrasts · Swiss revival uses the modernist grid straight, crisp and current; hauntology keeps a grid but ages its pictures with grain and halftone and lets something uncanny into them.
- Hipster Artisanal Revival Contrasts · Both fake an old firm, but the hipster badge revives Victorian craft for warmth and trust, while hauntology revives a post-war public institution so that it feels slightly wrong.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print the template on a risograph to get real grain, two or three inks and genuine misregistration instead of simulated wear.
- Witch House Graphics (Symbol Names and Haunted Web Imagery) Contrasts · Choose between Ghost Box's fictitious institutional series and this scene's coded artist identity: trade the ruled paperback title band for a glyph-name and a distressed photographic field.
- Dark Academia Contrasts · Both turn institutional nostalgia uncanny, but Ghost Box uses grotesque type, halftone and flat fields where this is serif, photographic and dense.
With London Transport Design
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Contemporary inventions of the public information graphic; pair Beck's schematic network with Neurath's counted pictograms for maps and statistics that share one flat, rational language.
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat Contrasts · The Sachplakat reduced every poster to one object and a brand name, while Pick let each artist choose a different picture inside a fixed frame; use the contrast to decide between one formula and a curated plurality.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · The post-war corporate identity programmes kept the idea of one system across every touchpoint but swapped Johnston's humanist sans for neo-grotesques and the many commissioned artists for a standards manual; choose London Transport for a warm public voice, corporate modernism for neutral uniformity.
- Vorticism & BLAST Typography Pairs well · Set a Vorticist field of angular planes under calm, evenly spaced lettering for a poster that has machine-age energy but still reads as a public service.
- British Road Signage (Kinneir & Calvert) Contrasts · Pick's Underground also held one public system together with a sans and a few colours, but surrounded it with commissioned artists' posters; the road signs allow no art at all, so choose London Transport when a system needs a cultural voice and the road signs when it must only inform.
- Legible City Wayfinding (Heads-Up Pedestrian Maps) Pairs well · The parent: Legible London is a TfL system in TfL's New Johnston that extends the Underground's single-system idea from stations to the streets between them; borrow the discipline of one family repeated everywhere.
- Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid) Pairs well · Both are British systems with a fixed emblem and a Johnston-to-Gill humanist sans; pair London Transport's commissioned pictorial art with Penguin's genre colour bands when one identity has to carry many varied items.
- Schematic Transit Diagram (Beck Tube Map Idiom) Pairs well · Set the diagram inside the wider transport identity of roundel, lettering and posters.