Style combination · Contrasts

Hipster Artisanal Revival × Slow-Living Editorial

The same Portland-era milieu of reclaimed wood and small makers, but where the craft badge piles crossed arrows, scripts and an 'Est.' date into one knowing emblem, the Kinfolk look drops the ornament and the irony and lets a quiet photograph carry the page.

From the research on Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)

Mix them and make something Hipster Artisanal Revival Slow-Living Editorial

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Hipster Artisanal Revival, their arrangement from Slow-Living Editorial, the finish from Hipster Artisanal Revival. 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 Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)

Type from Slow-Living Editorial: Humanist & Garalde serif
Wide letterspacing
Colour from Hipster Artisanal Revival: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from Hipster Artisanal Revival: Emblems & badges
Geometric primitives

Slow-Living Editorial avoids emblems & badges: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Composition from Slow-Living Editorial: Generous white space
Isolated object
Surface from Hipster Artisanal Revival: Paper & letterpress bite

The type

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

Display · Slow-Living Editorial

Again

EB Garamond, standing in for Garamond, Kinfolk's brand typeface, kept for body text through Charlotte Heal's 2015 redesign (It's Nice That, 2015)

Text · Hipster Artisanal Revival

The trade-mark look of the 2007–2018 craft boom, which dressed new coffee roasters, breweries and stationers as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century firms. A centred one-ink badge holds a line-drawn icon, crossed arrows or an X with words in its quadrants, a triangle and an 'Est.' date for a firm a year old, in tracked sans capitals and a flowing script on kraft, cream or chalkboard. Stock 'Hipster Badges' made it a template; by 2012–13 trend reports and parodies called it overdone, and by 2018 it had matured into colourless, detailed monoline badges that left the arrows and scripts behind.

Jost; Hipster Artisanal Revival used Wisdom Script (James T. Edmondson, Lost Type, 2011), originally drawn for the 'Woods of Wisdom' poster series and Brothers (John Downer, Emigre, 1999), after a turn-of-the-century chromolithographed Cole Brothers circus letterhead

The colours

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

Hipster Artisanal Revival Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look)

#f1e8d6 ground · 36%
#1e1c1a ink · 14%
#8e2f25 accent · 18%
#9a7b5f accent · 14%
#c4a27a accent · 10%
#b8bfae accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1e8d6;
  --ink: #1e1c1a;
  --accent-1: #8e2f25;
  --accent-2: #9a7b5f;
  --accent-3: #c4a27a;
  --accent-4: #b8bfae;
  --font-display: "EB Garamond", serif;
  --font-text: "Jost", 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.

Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look): Kinfolk and Cereal are living titles with their own mastheads and photographers: take the method (natural light, wide margins, a quiet serif), shoot or license your own pictures, and never letter the KINFOLK masthead or present a layout as an issue. Critics noted that its early pages pictured mostly young, white and beautiful people; cast, locate and style photographs widely so the calm does not become a single social type. By 2016 the magazine itself was casting more widely (FIT Library blog), so take the later issues, not the early imitators, as the model.