Style combination · Pairs well
Hipster Artisanal Revival × Victorian Letterpress
Go back to the source: swap the stock badge parts for real jobbing type, printers' rules and stock borders to turn pastiche into the trade print it quotes.
Mix them and make something Hipster Artisanal Revival Victorian Letterpress
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.
Hipster Artisanal Revival Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type
- Type from Victorian Letterpress
- Colour from Hipster Artisanal Revival
- Form from Hipster Artisanal Revival
- Composition from Hipster Artisanal Revival
- Surface from Victorian Letterpress
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Victorian Letterpress
Daydream
Abril Fatface, standing in for Fat face romans (Thorne, Figgins)
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Hipster Artisanal Revival, with a counter-accent from Victorian Letterpress. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Hipster Artisanal Revival Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type
-
#f1e8d6ground · 39% -
#1e1c1aink · 15% -
#8e2f25accent · 20% -
#c4a27aaccent · 15% -
#24477daccent · 11%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f1e8d6;
--ink: #1e1c1a;
--accent-1: #8e2f25;
--accent-2: #c4a27a;
--accent-3: #24477d;
--font-display: "Abril Fatface", 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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Hipster Artisanal Revival
- DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Contrasts · Where this dressed new firms as old ones, blanding dressed them as frictionless and new, with lowercase geometric sans, pastels and white space; set the two side by side to place a brand between heritage and novelty.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · The same small-batch maker economy; print the badge in one riso ink on uncoated stock to get real ink grain instead of a distress overlay.
- Flat Design Contrasts · Its contemporary on screen was textureless and many-coloured where this was single-ink and worn; one stamped badge inside a flat interface marks a product as hand-made.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Sign painting revived alongside it; paint the badge on the shop window or chalkboard so the lettering is made by hand instead of aged with a texture filter.
- Phototype Expressive Typography (Lubalin & U&lc) Contrasts · Both pair a script with a geometric sans, but the craft badge tracks its capitals wide in a centred one-ink frame, while Lubalin kerns the same pairing until the letters touch and join. Set one against the other to decide whether the letters should breathe or fuse.
- Cottagecore Contrasts · Shares handmade, small-batch values, but swap its black-and-white urban badges for soft colour and florals to get cottagecore.
- European Heraldry Contrasts · The craft badge borrows heraldry's air of lineage with an 'Est.' date and crossed arrows on kraft paper, while a real coat of arms is a granted or inherited, blazoned identity in strong tinctures; set the two side by side to show the difference between quoting heritage and holding it.
- Newtro (Korean New-Retro) Contrasts · Both dress a product in the past, but hipster badges invent a Victorian heritage for a new firm while newtro reissues a real firm's own recent archive.
With Victorian Letterpress
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Sign writers and type founders traded letterforms; add brushed shading and drop shadows to wood-type headlines for a street-made feel.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Push Pin revived Victorian display faces with irony; mix one wood-type headline with modern illustration for the same knowing nostalgia.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · One face, flush left and white space against a centred clamour of faces: use the contrast to test whether hierarchy needs variety at all.
- Arts & Crafts Movement Contrasts · Morris reacted against exactly this commercial clutter; set the two side by side to show craft restraint versus jobbing exuberance.
- HfG Ulm Systematic Design Contrasts · A Victorian mixed-face handbill is the clutter Ulm's one-family rule was meant to cure; use it as a before-and-after foil.
- Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway) Contrasts · Its black-letter-dense, type-and-ornament jobbing page is the opposite of a picture-led page; combine them by hanging a wood-type title over a flat colour picture.
- Dada Pairs well · Raid Victorian wood type and stock ornaments as the Dadaists did, but scatter them instead of centring them.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Pairs well · Both are cheap letterpress print that shouts to passers-by; borrow the playbill's stacked display capitals, banners and rules for a comic cover's blurbs and price box, while keeping the comic's hand-drawn letters and keyline art.