Stylogeny combining Nollywood Video Jacket × Onitsha Market Pamphlets

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Style combination · Pairs well

Nollywood Video Jacket × Onitsha Market Pamphlets

The same market print culture of eastern Nigeria, a literary rather than a visual ancestor: Okome hears the pamphlets' blurbs in Domitilla's jacket. Borrow the pamphlet's long moralising title and breathless blurb for the back of the jacket, not its letterpress look.

From the research on Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster

Mix them and make something Nollywood Video Jacket Onitsha Market Pamphlets

TOGETHERNollywood Video Jacket × Onitsha Market
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Nollywood Video Jacket, their arrangement from Nollywood Video Jacket, the finish from Onitsha Market Pamphlets. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster Onitsha Market Pamphlets

Type from Onitsha Market Pamphlets
Colour from Nollywood Video Jacket

Onitsha Market Pamphlets avoids full polychrome: this is where the two pull against each other.

Form from Nollywood Video Jacket
Composition from Nollywood Video Jacket
Surface from Onitsha Market Pamphlets

02

The type

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

Display · Onitsha Market Pamphlets

Together

Inter Tight, standing in for Jobbing grotesque and gothic capitals for cover titles

Text · Nollywood Video Jacket

The cover and poster art of Nigeria's home-video boom, from Living in Bondage (1992) on. Jackets for cassettes, then VCDs and DVDs, and posters were printed in offset for the marketers of Lagos, Onitsha and Aba. They are made from photographs, not paintings: stars cut out, often roughly, from key scenes and crowded over a busy ground in loud colour under a heavy, outlined title. Gore and melodrama sell by exaggeration; the blurb does the rest. A quieter strand (State of Emergency, Rattlesnake) told the story 'in minimal doses', and festival-bound films now favour minimalist posters.

Archivo; Nollywood Video Jacket used Heavy display titles, in capitals or upper and lower case, filled in yellow, red or orange and outlined or shadowed in a contrasting colour and Plain sans-serif capitals for the cast list, part number, production company and format badges

03

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Nollywood Video Jacket, with a counter-accent from Onitsha Market Pamphlets. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster Onitsha Market Pamphlets

  • #0f0b0a ground · 36%
  • #ece6da ink · 14%
  • #ff7a1a accent · 18%
  • #b8312f accent · 14%
  • #f7d117 accent · 10%
  • #e3a0a8 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0f0b0a;
  --ink: #ece6da;
  --accent-1: #ff7a1a;
  --accent-2: #b8312f;
  --accent-3: #f7d117;
  --accent-4: #e3a0a8;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster: These jackets show real, named Nigerian actors, so do not reproduce a real actor's likeness or a film's poster in commercial work without rights, and never present a generated image as an original Nollywood poster. Some of the occult-horror films the style sold were made to spread the belief that children can be possessed by evil spirits: End of the Wicked, produced by the preacher Helen Ukpabio, is the best known, and her views have been blamed for the stigmatising and abandonment of children accused of witchcraft. Borrow the montage, colour and type, not the demonising of 'witches', children or traditional religion, and do not use the style as a generic 'chaotic African' backdrop.

04

The two styles

A crowded supernatural action poster centres on a crying woman wearing red coral beads, surrounded by armed men, distressed women, a red-capped man, and sinister ritual figures. Skulls, candles, a cobra, flames, city buildings, a speedboat, and a woman struggling in water surround the large red-and-yellow title “BROKEN OATH.” 1992–present · Sub-Saharan Africa Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster The cover and poster art of Nigeria's home-video boom, from Living in Bondage (1992) on. Jackets for cassettes, then VCDs and DVDs, and posters were printed in offset for the marketers of Lagos, Onitsha and Aba. They are made from photographs, not paintings: stars cut out, often roughly, from key scenes and crowded over a busy ground in loud colour under a heavy, outlined title. Gore and melodrama sell by exaggeration; the blurb does the rest. A quieter strand (State of Emergency, Rattlesnake) told the story 'in minimal doses', and festival-bound films now favour minimalist posters. 1947–1980 · Sub-Saharan Africa Onitsha Market Pamphlets Cheap, stapled pamphlets of romance, advice, drama and political biography, written by students, clerks, journalists and traders and printed by jobbing letterpress shops around Onitsha Main Market in eastern Nigeria from the late 1940s. Covers did the selling at the stall: long moralising titles in mixed jobbing type, the price and the author's pen-name, and recycled photographs on coloured card. The trade lost its presses in the Nigeria–Biafra War and revived only briefly afterwards.

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More combinations

With Nollywood Video Jacket

With Onitsha Market Pamphlets

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