Stylogeny combining Japanese Postwar Modernism × minä perhonen

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Style combination · Pairs well

Japanese Postwar Modernism × minä perhonen

Both come from Japan and favour restrained, craft-minded everyday design, though the soft wobbling hand is minä perhonen's own.

From the research on minä perhonen (Hand-Drawn Textile Graphics, Akira Minagawa)

Mix them and make something Japanese Postwar Modernism minä perhonen

TideJapanese Postwar × minä perhonen1950 · 1995
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from minä perhonen, their arrangement from minä perhonen, the finish from Japanese Postwar Modernism. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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.

Japanese Postwar Modernism minä perhonen (Hand-Drawn Textile Graphics, Akira Minagawa)

Type from Japanese Postwar Modernism
Colour from Japanese Postwar Modernism
Form from minä perhonen
Composition from minä perhonen
Surface from Japanese Postwar Modernism

02

The type

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

Display · Japanese Postwar Modernism

Tide

Zen Kaku Gothic New, standing in for Gothic (kaku gothic Japanese sans)

Text · minä perhonen

A Tokyo label's textile graphics in which small hand-drawn birds, butterflies, forests and rings are repeated in loose, quiet rows, often embroidered so the stitching stays visible. It takes up the Nordic everyday ideal of Finnish bold print but reverses its scale: small embroidered hand marks, delicate and densely repeated, against one huge flat screen-printed motif in strong colour. The lineage from Finnish bold print is loose; the craft is Japanese and hand-made.

Zen Maru Gothic; minä perhonen used Lowercase sans-serif wordmark and No signature typeface; the pattern, not the type, carries the style

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Japanese Postwar Modernism, with a counter-accent from minä perhonen. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Japanese Postwar Modernism minä perhonen (Hand-Drawn Textile Graphics, Akira Minagawa)

  • #f4f1ea ground · 36%
  • #111111 ink · 14%
  • #d7261e accent · 18%
  • #c98f86 accent · 14%
  • #c8a24a accent · 10%
  • #d9cfc0 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f1ea;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #d7261e;
  --accent-2: #c98f86;
  --accent-3: #c8a24a;
  --accent-4: #d9cfc0;
  --font-display: "Zen Kaku Gothic New", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Zen Maru Gothic", sans-serif;
}

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The two styles

A large red sun sits above and behind a black triangular mountain with a gold tip on an off-white background. Bold black characters reading “太陽” appear in the upper-left corner. 1950–1990 · East Asia Japanese Postwar Modernism Building on the New Typography that Hiromu Hara and the Nippon Kobo circle had absorbed in the 1930s, Japan's postwar graphic designers fused the grid, sans-serif and objective photography of European modernism with indigenous traditions of family crests (kamon), asymmetry and charged emptiness (ma). From the Graphic '55 exhibition and the Nippon Design Center to Yusaku Kamekura's Tokyo 1964 Olympic posters, it produced bold emblematic symbols, luminous flat colour fields and photography of startling precision. An all-over pattern on a textured cream background combines small figures in sage-green dresses, dark blue birds, pink butterflies, leafy stems, flowers, and dotted green rings. Small blue lettering near the upper right reads “mori day.” 1995–present · East Asia, Northern Europe minä perhonen (Hand-Drawn Textile Graphics, Akira Minagawa) A Tokyo label's textile graphics in which small hand-drawn birds, butterflies, forests and rings are repeated in loose, quiet rows, often embroidered so the stitching stays visible. It takes up the Nordic everyday ideal of Finnish bold print but reverses its scale: small embroidered hand marks, delicate and densely repeated, against one huge flat screen-printed motif in strong colour. The lineage from Finnish bold print is loose; the craft is Japanese and hand-made.

05

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