Stylogeny combining Pacific Barkcloth Design × Tiki Pop

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Style combination · Contrasts

Pacific Barkcloth Design × Tiki Pop

Tiki menus borrowed tapa-like zigzag bands as mere borders; real ngatu, siapo and kapa are women's ceremonial wealth with named motifs, so set the two side by side to see what was flattened, and commission tapa makers rather than copying their patterns.

From the research on Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop)

Mix them and make something Pacific Barkcloth Design Tiki Pop

PopPacific BarkclothDesign × Tiki Pop1700 · 1934
A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Tiki Pop, their arrangement from Pacific Barkcloth Design, the finish from Tiki Pop. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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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.

Pacific Barkcloth (Tapa) Design Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop)

Type from Tiki Pop
Colour from Pacific Barkcloth Design
Form from Tiki Pop
Composition from Pacific Barkcloth Design

Tiki Pop avoids modular grid: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

Surface from Tiki Pop

02

The type

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

Display · Tiki Pop

Pop

Yellowtail, standing in for Casual brush script for venue names, as on the Waikiki Room menu at the Pick-Nicollet Hotel

Text · Pacific Barkcloth Design

Barkcloth beaten from paper-mulberry inner bark and decorated across Polynesia and Fiji for gift exchange at weddings, funerals and chiefly investitures. Motifs are transferred rather than simply drawn: rubbed over pattern boards in Tonga and Samoa, stencilled in Fiji, stamped in Hawai'i, then sharpened by hand. The palette is earth browns and soot black on cream bark, inside ruled squares and bands on cloths that can run past twenty metres.

Archivo; Pacific Barkcloth Design used Freehand-painted numerals and capitals on ngatu, from length markers to commemorative inscriptions and Faces with full support for Tongan, Samoan, Fijian and Hawaiian orthographies (ʻokina and macrons), e.g. Noto Sans, for accompanying text

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The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Pacific Barkcloth Design, with a counter-accent from Tiki Pop. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Pacific Barkcloth (Tapa) Design Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop)

  • #e9dcc0 ground · 36%
  • #161311 ink · 14%
  • #b9772f accent · 18%
  • #8a3b1f accent · 14%
  • #2a9d8f accent · 10%
  • #2e5e3a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #e9dcc0;
  --ink: #161311;
  --accent-1: #b9772f;
  --accent-2: #8a3b1f;
  --accent-3: #2a9d8f;
  --accent-4: #2e5e3a;
  --font-display: "Yellowtail", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Pacific Barkcloth (Tapa) Design: Tapa is women's ceremonial wealth, made collectively and presented at weddings, funerals and the investiture of chiefly titles; particular motifs commemorate events, lineages and royalty, and some designs belong to families, villages or chiefly lines. Commission and pay tapa makers and their work groups (such as the koka'anga in Tonga), credit the island and the maker, and do not lift motifs from museum cloths onto products or treat Tongan, Samoan, Fijian and Hawaiian traditions as one interchangeable 'Polynesian' pattern.

Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop): Tiki Pop is an outsider's pastiche built from sacred things: Polynesian wood images such as a Mangarevan tiki were carved to hold the mana of deities and stood on marae, and Hawaiian ki'i, Māori and Marquesan tiki belong to particular peoples, yet the style fused them into one grinning bar mascot and paired it with topless 'wahine' and 'savage' jokes, which Pacific artists such as Dan Taulapapa McMullin ('Tiki Manifesto') describe as erasure. Quote it as mid-century American commercial design, not as Polynesian art: invent your own non-sacred mascot rather than copying a named deity or museum carving, drop the sexualised island women and 'cannibal' caricature, do not use tā moko or Hawaiian words as decoration, and commission Pacific Islander artists when the subject is the Pacific itself.

04

The two styles

A bordered grid in black, ochre and rust on a mottled tan ground contains repeated sea turtles, diagonal leafy fronds, pointed rosettes, and suns above wavy water. Bands of triangles and diamonds divide the panels and surround the design. 1700–present · Oceania Pacific Barkcloth (Tapa) Design Barkcloth beaten from paper-mulberry inner bark and decorated across Polynesia and Fiji for gift exchange at weddings, funerals and chiefly investitures. Motifs are transferred rather than simply drawn: rubbed over pattern boards in Tonga and Samoa, stencilled in Fiji, stamped in Hawai'i, then sharpened by hand. The palette is earth browns and soot black on cream bark, inside ruled squares and bands on cloths that can run past twenty metres. A grinning wooden tiki figure holds a coconut cocktail beneath bamboo-style lettering reading “EMBER ISLE.” Flaming torches, tropical foliage, orange flowers, a volcano, and a moonlit sea surround it inside an ornate geometric border. 1934–present · North America Tiki Pop (Polynesian Pop) The mainland American fantasy of the South Seas, begun by Don the Beachcomber's Hollywood bar (about 1934) and Trader Vic's in Oakland and at its height in the Polynesian restaurants of the 1950s and 60s. Its first emblem was the idealised island woman, sometimes drawn bare-breasted; from the mid-1950s a composite carved 'Tiki', fused from Hawaiian, Marquesan, Māori, Rapa Nui and New Guinea sources, took over as logo, menu icon, matchbook and mug among bamboo lettering and tapa-like borders. Written off as kitsch by the 1970s, it has been revived since the late 1990s.

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More combinations

With Pacific Barkcloth Design

With Tiki Pop

Every style combination