Style combination · Contrasts

Hipster Artisanal Revival × Indie Sleaze

Near relative (the look was itself called hipster style in the 2000s), but craft, heritage badges and warm vintage stand against dirty, nocturnal flash photography.

From the research on Indie Sleaze

Mix them and make something Hipster Artisanal Revival Indie Sleaze

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Hipster Artisanal Revival, their arrangement from Hipster Artisanal Revival, the finish from Indie Sleaze. 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.

Hipster Artisanal Revival Indie Sleaze

Type from Hipster Artisanal Revival: All caps
Wide letterspacing
Colour from Indie Sleaze: Dark ground
Form from Hipster Artisanal Revival: Emblems & badges
Geometric primitives
Composition from Hipster Artisanal Revival: Central symmetry
Radial & concentric

Indie Sleaze avoids central symmetry: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Surface from Indie Sleaze: Grain & noise

The type

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

Display · Hipster Artisanal Revival

Okay

Jost, standing in for Futura (Paul Renner, Bauer, 1927), as on the Field Notes cover

Text · Indie Sleaze

Mainly a fashion and music-scene label applied in retrospect to the late-2000s indie and blog-rock crowd (skinny jeans, band tees, smudged eyeliner). Its graphic expression is mostly photographic and platform-based, not a designed system: amateur direct-flash party snapshots posted as an unedited stream to MySpace and early Tumblr, overexposed, noisy and dark-roomed. Its distinctness lies in that pairing of flash snapshot and blog stream.

Space Grotesk; Indie Sleaze used Default blog and profile-page sans-serif captions and The MySpace and Tumblr interface type around the photographs

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Indie Sleaze, with a counter-accent from Hipster Artisanal Revival. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Hipster Artisanal Revival Indie Sleaze

#0d0b0e ground · 36%
#e6e1ea ink · 14%
#c8322d accent · 18%
#8e2f25 accent · 14%
#5a3a63 accent · 10%
#c4a27a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0d0b0e;
  --ink: #e6e1ea;
  --accent-1: #c8322d;
  --accent-2: #8e2f25;
  --accent-3: #5a3a63;
  --accent-4: #c4a27a;
  --font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Space Grotesk", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Hipster Artisanal Revival: The hipster fashion and branding of the same years also borrowed pseudo-Native 'tribal' dress: Adrienne Keene's Native Appropriations (2010) answered the fashion for 'hipster headdresses' by noting that eagle feathers 'have to be earned', and in 2012 the Navajo Nation sued Urban Outfitters over goods sold under the 'Navajo' name. Keep to arrows, triangles and trade-mark devices; do not add feathered headdresses, war bonnets or 'tribal' and 'Navajo' patterns as a heritage shorthand.

Indie Sleaze: The look was built on photographing real people, often drunk or intoxicated, in nightlife, and posting the pictures publicly without their ongoing consent; the Cobrasnake archive and the Tumblr and MySpace posts are of identifiable individuals. Terry Richardson, whom Wikipedia lists among the mid-2000s photographers who embraced the style, has been accused by multiple models of sexual misconduct and exploitation (he says the allegations are false) and Condé Nast stopped commissioning him in 2017; he is deliberately left out of the exemplars and his work is not a model to follow. The revival raises the same consent and privacy questions: get consent from anyone identifiable, and do not reuse old nightlife photographs of real people as stock for a retro look.