Style combination · Contrasts

Swiss Punk × Post-Punk Record Sleeve

Both took modernism apart in the same years: Weingart's Basel school layered type and broke the grid, while post-punk sleeves quoted one borrowed image and withheld the type; choose between layering and withholding.

From the research on Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD)

Mix them and make something Swiss Punk Post-Punk Record Sleeve

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Swiss Punk, their arrangement from Post-Punk Record Sleeve, the finish from Swiss Punk. 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.

Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD)

Type from Swiss Punk: Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Wide letterspacing
Colour from Post-Punk Record Sleeve: Dark ground
Monochrome
Form from Swiss Punk: Rules & bars
Geometric primitives
Composition from Post-Punk Record Sleeve: Single focal point
Isolated object
Surface from Swiss Punk: Halftone & Ben-Day dots

The type

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

Display · Swiss Punk

Hello

Inter Tight, standing in for Akzidenz-Grotesk

Text · Post-Punk Record Sleeve

The record sleeves that British art-school designers made after punk, for independent labels and some majors: Barney Bubbles at Stiff, Malcolm Garrett for Buzzcocks, Peter Saville at Factory and 23 Envelope at 4AD. Instead of xerox collage, a sleeve became an art-directed object: one quoted or treated image (a pulsar plot, a Fantin-Latour still life, a Futurist poster, a misty photograph) on a quiet field or edge to edge, the band's name shrunk, coded or left off, riddles and catalogue numbers in its place, printed offset on textured, silver, gold or die-cut stock.

Space Mono; Post-Punk Record Sleeve used Peter Saville's colour-coded alphabet, one coloured block per letter, decoded by a wheel on the back of Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) and used for the title of Blue Monday and Small, ordered sans-serif capitals in the manner of Jan Tschichold's New Typography, which Saville took as his model from the 1978 Factory poster onwards

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Post-Punk Record Sleeve, with a counter-accent from Swiss Punk. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD)

#111111 ground · 36%
#ece6da ink · 14%
#f2c230 accent · 18%
#e6007e accent · 14%
#b8963e accent · 10%
#b23a48 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #111111;
  --ink: #ece6da;
  --accent-1: #f2c230;
  --accent-2: #e6007e;
  --accent-3: #b8963e;
  --accent-4: #b23a48;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Space Mono", monospace;
}

Use it with care

Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD): The sleeves are in copyright, and several of their quoted images have their own authors, such as Harold Craft's pulsar plot and Bernard Pierre Wolff's photograph of the Appiani tomb: make a new quotation from a public-domain or licensed source rather than copying a Factory, Stiff or 4AD cover or its colour code.

The two styles

1968–1990 · Central Europe, North America Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography A rebellion from inside the Swiss school: Wolfgang Weingart and his Basel students kept the grotesque and the grid but set them in motion with extreme letterspacing, stepped and angled lines, rules and bars, enlarged halftone screens and layered film montage. Carried to the US by April Greiman, Dan Friedman and others, it became an intuitive, textured counterpoint to corporate modernism and a bridge to digital postmodern typography. 1977–1990 · Western Europe Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) The record sleeves that British art-school designers made after punk, for independent labels and some majors: Barney Bubbles at Stiff, Malcolm Garrett for Buzzcocks, Peter Saville at Factory and 23 Envelope at 4AD. Instead of xerox collage, a sleeve became an art-directed object: one quoted or treated image (a pulsar plot, a Fantin-Latour still life, a Futurist poster, a misty photograph) on a quiet field or edge to edge, the band's name shrunk, coded or left off, riddles and catalogue numbers in its place, printed offset on textured, silver, gold or die-cut stock.