Style combination · Pairs well
Swiss Punk × Neo-Swiss Revival
Borrow New Wave's letterspacing and stepped lines to make a contemporary neo-Swiss grid feel alive.
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.
Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography Neo-Swiss Revival
- Type from Swiss Punk
- Colour from Neo-Swiss Revival
- Form from Swiss Punk
- Composition from Neo-Swiss Revival
- Surface from Swiss Punk
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Neo-Swiss Revival
A contemporary revival of the International Typographic Style, fuelled by digital re-releases of neo-grotesques and by studios such as Experimental Jetset and Norm: modular grids, flush-left grotesque type, huge tightly set headlines and flat fields of black, white and one signal colour. It treats Swiss modernism as a living toolkit for posters, identities and the responsive web, sometimes with a knowing, citational wink.
Inter; Neo-Swiss Revival used Akkurat and Neue Haas Grotesk
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Neo-Swiss Revival, with a counter-accent from Swiss Punk. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography Neo-Swiss Revival
-
#f5f5f0ground · 36% -
#111111ink · 14% -
#ff4a1caccent · 18% -
#e6007eaccent · 14% -
#1d3bffaccent · 10% -
#f7d117accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f5f5f0;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #ff4a1c;
--accent-2: #e6007e;
--accent-3: #1d3bff;
--accent-4: #f7d117;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Swiss Punk
- Memphis Design Pairs well · Add Memphis squiggles and pastel triangles to New Wave's floating bars for the full 1980s postmodern palette.
- Renaissance Book Typography Contrasts · Classical centred book typography is the calm foil to New Wave's stepped, letterspaced lines.
- British Style Press (The Face, i-D and Arena) Pairs well · Both took modernism apart in the 1980s: add Weingart's layered, tracked grotesques to a Brody spread for a more Swiss, less drawn result.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Contrasts · 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.
- Dutch Expressive Postmodernism (Studio Dumbar & Hard Werken) Contrasts · Basel's rebellion kept the grotesque and the halftone in an abstract grid; the Dutch one brings in figures, props, painting and photographed depth. Choose Basel New Wave for abstract type textures and the Dutch idiom when the poster needs objects and a stage.
With Neo-Swiss Revival
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print neo-Swiss posters in two riso spot inks to add grain and warmth to a strict grid.
- Acid Graphics / New Ugly Contrasts · Acid graphics' chrome chaos is the opposite pole; one liquid-metal element can puncture a too-polite grid.
- Brutalist Web Design Pairs well · Expose neo-Swiss grids with raw HTML defaults and visible borders for a stripped, contemporary web voice.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Contrasts · Victorian wood-type eclecticism is the history Swiss typography rejected; a single wood-type headline can warm a cold grid.
- Seoul Independent Graphic Design (Small-Studio Scene) Contrasts · The Seoul studios share Neo-Swiss's Dutch and Swiss roots (Mevis & Van Deursen, Jude Kang's studies in Switzerland, Favorit Hangul extending the Swiss foundry Dinamo's Favorit), but Neo-Swiss sets one Latin grotesque flush left on a modular grid, while the Seoul studios centre their text, repeat circles and letters as objects, and make Hangul, reshaped and set beside Latin, the main material.
- Blue Note Jazz Sleeve Modernism Contrasts · The atlas's nearest genome: both blow a grotesque up to fill the format on a white ground with one signal colour, but Swiss revival locks it to a modular grid, flush left, in one neo-grotesque; Blue Note crops and tints a documentary photograph, mixes in Ultra Bodoni and Clarendon, and squeezes, warps and runs words off the edge by eye. Choose Blue Note when the type should swing rather than align.
- Lucerne Poster Scene (Neubad & Südpol Posters) Contrasts · Neo-Swiss keeps the grotesque intact on a modular grid for identities and the web; Lucerne keeps the grotesque only for the small print and distorts the title itself, poster by poster. Choose neo-Swiss for a system, Lucerne for a one-off event.
- Emigre & Early Digital Type Contrasts · Neo-Swiss restraint is the foil to Emigre's typographic overload; one Emigre display face in a neo-Swiss layout adds personality.