Style combination · Contrasts
Phototype Expressive Typography × Post-Binary Typography
Both make new meaning by interlocking letters into ligatures, but Lubalin's phototype ligatures are tight-set display wit for headlines and logotypes, while post-binary ligatures carry gender inside the word, in running French text as well as on banners; choose Lubalin for a witty headline, post-binary glyphs when the grammar of the word is the message.
Mix them and make something Phototype Expressive Typography Post-Binary Typography
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.
Phototype Expressive Typography (Lubalin & U&lc) Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)
- Type from Phototype Expressive Typography
- Colour from Phototype Expressive Typography
- Form from Post-Binary Typography
- Composition from Phototype Expressive Typography
- Surface from Post-Binary Typography
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Phototype Expressive Typography
Pop
Josefin Sans, standing in for ITC Avant Garde Gothic (Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase, 1970; 33 alternate characters and interlocking capital ligatures)
Text · Post-Binary Typography
A Franco-Belgian type practice that redesigns written French for gender inclusion inside the word. Instead of the point médian, which the Académie française and the French state call a barrier to reading, new glyphs fuse masculine and feminine endings and ligatures or 'symbiotic' strokes join letters, so inclusive and non-binary words read as one form. Led since 2018 by the collective Bye Bye Binary, it forks open-source families under open licences and its own usage conditions (the CUTE), encodes them in a Queer Unicode Initiative and spreads them through workshops, banners and magazines.
Jost; Post-Binary Typography used BBB Baskervvol (Bye Bye Binary, from 2018), a post-binary fork of ANRT's Baskervville and BBB Poppins TN (Eugénie Bidaut and Camille Circlude, 2022), after Jonny Pinhorn's Poppins
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Phototype Expressive Typography, with a counter-accent from Post-Binary Typography. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Phototype Expressive Typography (Lubalin & U&lc) Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type)
-
#f8f6f1ground · 36% -
#111111ink · 14% -
#d1322baccent · 18% -
#d42a7faccent · 14% -
#8a8479accent · 10% -
#ee5d63accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f8f6f1;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #d1322b;
--accent-2: #d42a7f;
--accent-3: #8a8479;
--accent-4: #ee5d63;
--font-display: "Josefin Sans", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Post-Binary Typography (Bye Bye Binary and Inclusive French Type): This is the living practice of a queer, trans and non-binary community and of named designers, most of them active: do not use the glyphs as decorative 'Pride' texture or for brand campaigns that ignore the people they were made for; follow the CUTE that comes with the fonts: credit and link the designers, keep the files complete, give on its sliding scale (€300 to €1,000 for a cultural institution) and respect its answer to companies that want an inclusive image to pinkwash: 'Look elsewhere'; and never attribute a generated poster or font to the collective or prompt an image model with its members' names. Image models invent fake ligatures and misspell French, so set real inclusive words in the actual fonts and have them checked by people who use them. Type the median-dot forms and let the OpenType features display the glyphs, rather than pasting QUNI's Private Use Area characters, which screen readers cannot voice meaningfully and which turn into blanks or wrong signs when copied or shown in another font. In France, inclusive writing with the point médian is proscribed in schools by circular (2021) and a Senate bill sought to ban it more widely (2023), so check before setting official French public documents this way.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Phototype Expressive Typography
- Hipster Artisanal Revival 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.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Push Pin revives old styles through drawn figures and Lubalin through the letters themselves; pair a Push Pin illustration with a swash, tightly kerned Lubalin headline for full 1970s New York warmth.
- Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism Pairs well · Same New York years and the same belief that the title can be the picture; give a Miles-style tinted photograph a Lubalin logotype whose letters touch and interlock instead of a plain blown-up grotesque.
- Emigre & Early Digital Type Contrasts · Both were made by a new type technology; Emigre's bitmap and PostScript faces end the phototype era, so set a Lubalin ligature against a coarse bitmap word to show how the tool shapes the letter.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Even spacing, flush-left grotesque and a grid against letters squeezed until they fuse into one centred logotype: put the two side by side to decide whether type should stay neutral or carry the joke.
- Di Tella Graphic Design (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella) Pairs well · Both made the word the picture in the same years; add Lubalin's tight, playful letter-joins to Di Tella's blunt flat-ink title for a headline-led identity.
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas) Contrasts · Same New York years and the same habit of locking letters together until they touch, but Lubalin kerned polished phototype for advertising while Maciunas pressed leftover dry-transfer letters into puzzle monograms on kraft; choose between the commercial ligature and the scavenged one.
- Vyaz (Ornamental Slavonic Lettering) Pairs well · Lubalin's phototype logotypes also merge neighbouring letters into ligatures and crowd them into a single shape; borrow vyaz's shared stems and nested small letters for a Cyrillic logotype, and keep it to one or two words so it stays readable.
With Post-Binary Typography
- Emigre & Early Digital Type Pairs well · Both are type-led laboratories that publish their own magazine as a showcase for their fonts. In Zone Mixte (2022) êkhô studio chose BBB Baskervvol with Baskerville's erasure of Sarah Eaves in mind, the story Zuzana Licko honoured in Mrs Eaves (1996); set a Baskervvol text in an Emigre-style specimen spread to join the two foundry experiments.
- Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Contrasts · Both extend a typeface's character set for a language need, but dual-script design matches two scripts for neutral, institutional legibility, while post-binary type invents new characters within one script and keeps them visible as a political statement.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Fanzines, programmes and short-run posters carry much of the practice, such as Hannah Beaudeux's risograph-printed La tendresse des murs (2025), set with Enby Gertrude; print a post-binary text in one or two riso inks to keep it cheap and communal.
- Acid Graphics / New Ugly Pairs well · The collective's banners share Acid Graphics' blackletter, spiky stars, gradients and chrome-like lettering; borrow that repertoire for a manifesto banner or flyer, but keep the post-binary glyph legible as the subject rather than the surface effect.
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Contrasts · Both are queer activist graphics, but Gran Fury borrowed advertising's photographs and slogans and kept standard letters (Futura, Gill Sans), while post-binary type leaves the picture ordinary and changes the alphabet. Choose Gran Fury for a public accusation, post-binary glyphs when the words themselves must include everyone.
- Out-of-Square Hangul Typography Pairs well · Both redesign the structure of letters for a social idea: Ahn Sang-soo freed Hangul syllables from the square, post-binary type frees French word endings from the gender binary. Pair them when a project is about how a script could be otherwise.