Style combination · Contrasts

Hipster Artisanal Revival × Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Hipster branding locked a script accent inside a one-ink badge with tracked capitals, crossed arrows and an 'Est.' date; modern calligraphy drops the badge and the irony and lets the script fill a pale page in pastel and gold. Choose between heritage pastiche and a personal, romantic hand.

From the research on Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Mix them and make something Hipster Artisanal Revival Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Hipster Artisanal Revival, their arrangement from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering, the finish from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering. 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 Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Type from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering: Script
Hand-lettering
Colour from Hipster Artisanal Revival: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from Hipster Artisanal Revival: Emblems & badges
Geometric primitives
Composition from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering: Central symmetry
Generous white space
Surface from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering: Painterly brushwork
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

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

Display · Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Kin

Kaushan Script, standing in for Brush-pen script (brush lettering): thick downstrokes and thin upstrokes from felt-tip brush pens, brushes and paint pens, often in watercolour

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 Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Hipster Artisanal Revival Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

#f1e8d6 ground · 36%
#1e1c1a ink · 14%
#8e2f25 accent · 18%
#c6a45a accent · 14%
#2f3b52 accent · 10%
#a8b9a3 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1e8d6;
  --ink: #1e1c1a;
  --accent-1: #8e2f25;
  --accent-2: #c6a45a;
  --accent-3: #2f3b52;
  --accent-4: #a8b9a3;
  --font-display: "Kaushan Script", cursive;
  --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.

Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering: Modern calligraphy is a living trade of freelance calligraphers who sell wedding commissions, workshops and scanned alphabets: commission or license a hand instead of tracing a calligrapher's published names, quotes or practice sheets, and never present a generated hand as the work of a named letterer. Image models write pseudo-script with missing, doubled or garbled letters, so have every word written by hand or checked letter by letter before it goes on an invitation or a sign.

The two styles

A distressed rust-red oval badge on cream paper contains snowcapped mountains, pine trees, a lake, and a sun with radiating rays. The words “WILDSTONE SUPPLY” sit above crossed arrows, a small pine tree, and “EST. 2018.”

2007–2018 · North America, Global / networked 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.

The word “Bloom” appears in large, flowing dark blue calligraphy on an ivory background. Symmetrical watercolor-style arrangements of pale pink flowers, green leaves, and fine stems with golden dots frame it above and below.

2005–present · North America, Western Europe, Global / networked Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering The loose pointed-pen and brush-pen script of wedding stationery and the 2010s craft boom. It keeps copperplate's thick downstrokes and hairline upstrokes but drops the fixed slant and baseline, so letters bounce, loop and trail long exit strokes. A name or short phrase sits centred on white or cream stock in black, gold or watercolour, often among painted leaves. Taught in manuals from 2013, it became a mass hobby; the type designer Ale Paul saw 'an almost invasive DIY streak' in the wider lettering boom (2015), and by 2025 Monotype called it 'the norm' for weddings, cliché and all.

More combinations

With Hipster Artisanal Revival

All 19 combinations with Hipster Artisanal Revival

With Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

All 10 combinations with Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Every style combination