Style combination · Pairs well

Slow-Living Editorial × Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Set one written name or headline over Kinfolk's humanist-serif text, white margins and soft natural-light photographs, so the hand carries the feeling and the type carries the reading.

From the research on Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Mix them and make something Slow-Living Editorial Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Slow-Living Editorial, 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.

Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look) Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

Type from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering: Script
Hand-lettering
Colour from Slow-Living Editorial: Pastel
Earth & mineral
Form from Slow-Living Editorial: Naturalistic depiction
Ornament-free
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

Home

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 · Slow-Living Editorial

The look of Kinfolk, the slow-living quarterly founded in Portland in 2011 and run from Copenhagen since 2015, and of the indie lifestyle titles and Instagram feeds that copied it. Soft, naturally lit photographs of laid tables, wood-and-linen interiors and their unhurried owners sit in wide white margins on matte paper; a classical serif and slender capitals carry little text; colour stays in whites, oatmeal, wood and pastel. By 2014 'Kinfolk' was used as an adjective for a kind of photography.

EB Garamond; Slow-Living Editorial used Garamond, Kinfolk's brand typeface, kept for body text through Charlotte Heal's 2015 redesign and The slender capitals of the KINFOLK masthead, 'the same slender text as on the cover of each of the magazine's issues' (Portland Monthly, 2014), reworked by Abi Huynh in 2015

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Slow-Living Editorial, with a counter-accent from Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Slow-Living Editorial (the Kinfolk Look) Modern Calligraphy and Brush Lettering

#f7f4ee ground · 36%
#2d2a27 ink · 14%
#9a7b5f accent · 18%
#c6a45a accent · 14%
#dfcabf accent · 10%
#a8b9a3 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f7f4ee;
  --ink: #2d2a27;
  --accent-1: #9a7b5f;
  --accent-2: #c6a45a;
  --accent-3: #dfcabf;
  --accent-4: #a8b9a3;
  --font-display: "Kaushan Script", cursive;
  --font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}

Use it with care

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.

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.