Style combination · Pairs well
Hype Streetwear Graphics × Superflat
Takashi Murakami, who named Superflat, made a Supreme Box Logo Tee for COVID-19 relief in 2020; when a single red logo is too austere, bring in Superflat's polychrome cartoon figures, but keep them inside one flat, contained shape so the logo still reads first.
Mix them and make something Hype Streetwear Graphics Superflat
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.
Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks) Superflat
- Type from Hype Streetwear Graphics
- Colour from Superflat
- Form from Hype Streetwear Graphics
- Composition from Hype Streetwear Graphics
- Surface from Superflat
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Hype Streetwear Graphics
Wow.
Jost, standing in for Futura Heavy Oblique in white reversed out of a red box (Supreme, from 1994), taken from Barbara Kruger's captions, which are set in Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed on red bars
Text · Superflat
The flat, saturated, cartoon-crowded look that Takashi Murakami named in his exhibition and manifesto Superflat (Tokyo, 2000; US tour 2001). It draws a line from Edo painting and prints to postwar anime and manga, and flattens high and low, art and merchandise into one plane. Smiling flowers, many-eyed characters and anime figures come in unshaded polychrome, smooth and glossy, cute and grotesque at once, sold as handbags and album covers as well as paintings. This entry follows the drawn core of Murakami and his Kaikai Kiki circle; the shows also held photography, video and sculpture.
Zen Maru Gothic; Superflat used Letters drawn into the character and Many-coloured repeated monogram
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Superflat, with a counter-accent from Hype Streetwear Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks) Superflat
-
#fbfaf5ground · 36% -
#1a1a1aink · 14% -
#ffd900accent · 18% -
#00a0e9accent · 14% -
#e4202aaccent · 10% -
#e4007faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #fbfaf5;
--ink: #1a1a1a;
--accent-1: #ffd900;
--accent-2: #00a0e9;
--accent-3: #e4202a;
--accent-4: #e4007f;
--font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Zen Maru Gothic", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks): Streetwear grew out of African-American and Latino hip-hop dress in New York, and its turn into a global luxury phenomenon has been criticised as cultural appropriation; Dapper Dan's Harlem boutique, which pioneered logo-covered garments, was closed by counterfeiting raids and a Fendi lawsuit in 1992, and Gucci's 2017 jacket followed his 1989 design for Diane Dixon and was called a homage only after criticism. The marks are living trademarks that their owners defend (Supreme sued Married to the Mob in 2013) and Kruger's work is her own: design your own wordmark and collaborations, do not reproduce the Supreme box, the Off-White stripes or luxury monograms (the Off-White stripes were themselves disputed as borrowed from Ben Kelly, who popularised the graphic in the early 1980s; generic hazard striping is free, a brand's lockup is not), credit the culture you draw on, including the AAVE origin of the word hypebeast, and never present a generated image as a real product or drop.
Superflat: Some canonical works use explicit otaku sexual imagery, such as Murakami's My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), and associated artists engage with lolicon art: Mr. describes himself as a lolicon and Henmaru Machino parodies it; never sexualise childlike figures. The mushroom-cloud skulls of Murakami's Time Bokan works and the title Little Boy, the name of the Hiroshima bomb, refer to the atomic bombings, and critics such as Dong-Yeon Koh argue that this victim narrative obscures Japanese aggression in China and Korea; do not use mushroom clouds or skulls as cute decoration. Handle borrowed Buddhist iconography and phrases, such as Kannon, with respect, and draw original characters and flowers: Mr. DOB, the smiling flowers and the Louis Vuitton monogram are owned designs.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Hype Streetwear Graphics
- Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Pairs well · Streetwear grew out of New York hip-hop dress; pair a set geometric wordmark with a hand-drawn graffiti piece for a back print, but keep the logo flat and centred so the tag reads as the decoration and the box as the brand.
- DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Contrasts · Both centre one product on a plain ground, but direct-to-consumer brands use lowercase geometric sans and pastels to look friendly and always available, while hype graphics use loud spot colour, heavy oblique or capital wordmarks and scarcity; pick approachability or exclusivity.
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Contrasts · Both took Barbara Kruger's heavy Futura capitals on a bar, but Gran Fury used them to accuse government and drug companies on bus sides, while Supreme put them in a red box to create desire for a scarce shirt; decide whether the slogan sells or indicts before borrowing the idiom.
- Bandung Distro Graphics Pairs well · Shares the label-as-identity logic of small-run screenprinted apparel; hype streetwear is a later, Western, commercial scene, whereas distro is a city shop economy rooted in local pride.
With Superflat
- Kawaii Design Contrasts · Kawaii offers sincere, simple, pastel cuteness for fancy goods; switch to Superflat when the cute should be saturated, crowded, many-eyed and ironic, a comment on consumer culture rather than a product of it.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Both turn commodities into art; take Pop's repetition and frontal commodity but swap its halftone and off-register silkscreen for Superflat's smooth vector fills and anime characters, so the print process disappears.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Contrasts · One dense field of smiling flowers on an otherwise empty white page gives a minimal layout a single loud focal point without giving up its calm.
- Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints Pairs well · Murakami traces Superflat's flatness back to Hokusai's prints; borrow the woodblock keyline, the stylised wave and the cropped composition and fill them with Superflat's saturated characters.
- Techno-Futurist Graphics Pairs well · groovisions, whose Chappie figure showed in the 2001 Superflat exhibition, links the two; set Superflat characters inside techno-futurist logos, grids and katakana captions for a slicker, more corporate parody.
- Angura Theatre Poster Contrasts · Both quote ukiyo-e and Pop from Japan, but angura crams photographs and fluorescent silkscreen into a rebellious collage while Superflat draws everything smooth and flat; set one flat Superflat character against an angura photomontage for a clash of eras.
- Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Contrasts · Murakami's Superflat lifts anime and manga figures out of the story onto one flat, glossy, polychrome plane for the gallery; story manga keeps the sequence, the depth of its backgrounds and its single black ink.
- Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic Contrasts · Both draw on anime, but superflat flattens otaku imagery into ironic, polychrome, all-over fields with no depth; choose lofi for one sincere, softly lit room with depth, and superflat when the brief wants pop density and knowing play.