Style combination · Contrasts
Newtro × Seoul Independent Graphic Design
Both are contemporary and Korean, but newtro reissues big brands' old labels and mascots in flat spot colours, while the small studios design for low-budget culture with type alone; choose newtro for nostalgia on a shelf and the small-studio idiom for an exhibition or a book.
Mix them and make something Newtro Seoul Independent Graphic Design
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.
Newtro (Korean New-Retro) Seoul Independent Graphic Design (Small-Studio Scene)
- Type from Seoul Independent Graphic Design
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Newtro avoids experimental & distorted: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Colour from Newtro
- Form from Newtro
- Composition from Seoul Independent Graphic Design
- Surface from Newtro
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Seoul Independent Graphic Design
Pop
Black Han Sans, standing in for Favorit Hangul (Yoon Mingoo with Dinamo, 2019), a Hangul companion to Dinamo's Latin Favorit, part of the type industry's turn to multi-script families
Text · Newtro
A South Korean branding trend, named 'Going New-tro' in Seoul National University's Trend Korea 2019 (October 2018), in which heritage firms reissue their own postwar to 1990s labels, trademarks and mascots, polished for young buyers. Jinro's sky-blue bottle and toad label (2019) and Gompyo flour's white bear on beer cans (2020) set the look: centred labels and badges, two or three flat colours on pale grounds, brush, cursive or hand-drawn logotypes, often Hanja with Hangul beside them, and a cartoon mascot as hero. Its source is the recent consumer past, reinterpreted, not reproduced.
Zen Maru Gothic; Newtro used Revived label logotypes in Hanja with Hangul beside them, such as Jinro's Hanja name from its 1970s–80s labels and Daesun soju's cursive lettering from its 1965 launch and Thick brush and hand-drawn Hangul display lettering of postwar Korean packaging and shop signboards
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Newtro, with a counter-accent from Seoul Independent Graphic Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Newtro (Korean New-Retro) Seoul Independent Graphic Design (Small-Studio Scene)
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#f4ecd8ground · 36% -
#1c1c1cink · 14% -
#f0b929accent · 18% -
#2448d8accent · 14% -
#d7322baccent · 10% -
#ff5aa5accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4ecd8;
--ink: #1c1c1c;
--accent-1: #f0b929;
--accent-2: #2448d8;
--accent-3: #d7322b;
--accent-4: #ff5aa5;
--font-display: "Black Han Sans", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Zen Maru Gothic", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Newtro (Korean New-Retro): Newtro revives a firm's own archive: for any other client draw on that client's history, not Jinro's toad or Gompyo's bear, which their owners guard. In 2023 the first cans of 7Bräu's Daepyo Wheat Beer, which kept Gompyo's colour scheme and a bear, drew Daehan Flour Mills' warning that copying the brand's design could be unfair competition, and 7Bräu promised a redesign with a tiger. Keep Hangul and Hanja correct and legible, and do not swap in Japanese Shōwa-retro or colonial-era 'Gyeongseong' imagery: a 2018 JoongAng Ilbo column called restaurants that mix Japanese food with Gyeongseong nostalgia 'tasteless', since those who lived through the occupation remember it as 'shameful and painful'.
Seoul Independent Graphic Design (Small-Studio Scene): These are living, named designers and studios, so never attribute a generated poster or book to Sulki & Min, Everyday Practice or any other studio, and never prompt an image model with their names. Image models often produce pseudo-Hangul: have every Hangul word written or checked by a Korean reader, or leave the text out. Do not paste hanbok, dancheong patterns or a taegeuk emblem on as decoration to signal 'Korean'; where the studios touch such ideas (Sulki & Min's patterns on Hangul vowels and yin-yang), they work them out through the structure of the letters. Choi Sung Min warns that the pressure on Korean designers to find a 'true self' is a problematic Orientalism, and this scene works through type and concept, not national motifs.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Newtro
- Out-of-Square Hangul Typography Contrasts · Set the modernist, geometric de-squared Hangul of Ahn Sang-soo against newtro's revived brush and cursive label lettering to show two ideas of fashionable Hangul.
- Hipster Artisanal Revival Contrasts · Both dress a product in the past, but hipster badges invent a Victorian heritage for a new firm while newtro reissues a real firm's own recent archive.
- Synthwave / Outrun Contrasts · Synthwave imagines an eighties that never shipped, in neon gradients; newtro reprints packaging that actually sat on Korean shelves, in flat spot colours.
- Guochao (China-Chic National Trend) Contrasts · China's contemporary heritage trend draws on imperial and folk motifs in red and gold; newtro draws on late-twentieth-century consumer packaging and its mascots.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Newtro's lettering is borrowed from Korean signboards; pair a revived label with real sign-painted shopfronts, as Euljiro's cafés keep their old hardware-store signs.
- Kawaii Design Pairs well · Revived trademarks become cute merchandise and emoticons; push the toad or bear toward kawaii roundness for spin-offs while keeping the label's period lettering.
- Showa and Heisei Retro Revival (Japanese Packaging and Kissaten Graphics) Contrasts · Both revive old everyday graphics, but newtro is Korean heritage-brand reissue with badge-led logic, while this is Japanese katakana-led kissaten and dagashi graphics in pastel spot colour.
- Taiwan Floral Cloth (Huabu) Pairs well · Both turn a postwar household look into nostalgia for young buyers; pair a reissued retro label or mascot with a floral-cloth band for packaging that recalls a grandmother's home.
With Seoul Independent Graphic Design
- Korean Commercial Calligraphy (Kaelligeurapi) Contrasts · Commercial calligraphy writes one warm brushed word for a soju label or a drama title; the small studios construct and systematise Hangul, even when they reinterpret old calligraphic scripts. Decide between a signature and a system.
- Out-of-Square Hangul Typography Pairs well · Ahn Sang-soo freed Hangul from the square in 1985, and Sulki & Min have gone further back, to Cho Young-jae's 1976 proposal to restructure Hangul for typewriters, a study they say has rarely been discussed with the depth it deserves, and to the origins of unsquared Hangul; set a hanging, de-squared headline in a centred one-colour poster to join the generations.
- Neo-Swiss Revival 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.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Corners (founded 2012), which runs a risograph print shop and publishing house, set up a print shop with Manual inside the Ilmin exhibition in 2016; print a small-studio poster in one or two riso inks, but keep the Hangul–Latin type system as the subject rather than illustration.
- Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Pairs well · Both answer the type industry's turn to multi-script families, as Favorit Hangul pairs with Dinamo's Latin; borrow that culture's matched, equal-weight scripts when a Seoul poster or book must run in Korean and English.