Style combination · Pairs well
Post-Punk Record Sleeve × Vorticism
Wadsworth's dazzle camouflage came back on OMD's Dazzle Ships sleeve (1983): print the angular dazzle bands behind a die-cut or panelled sleeve and keep the type in small, spaced grotesque capitals.
Mix them and make something Post-Punk Record Sleeve Vorticism
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.
Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Vorticism & BLAST Typography
- Type from Vorticism
- Colour from Vorticism
- Form from Vorticism
- Composition from Post-Punk Record Sleeve
- Surface from Post-Punk Record Sleeve
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Vorticism
Fine
Archivo Black; Vorticism used Grotesque No. 9 (Stephenson Blake), the heavy jobbing grotesque of most of BLAST's manifesto pages and Latin Bold for the boxed section numerals of the manifesto
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Vorticism, with a counter-accent from Post-Punk Record Sleeve. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Vorticism & BLAST Typography
-
#efe9dcground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#e8b62caccent · 18% -
#e2388faccent · 14% -
#b8963eaccent · 10% -
#5b4486accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe9dc;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #e8b62c;
--accent-2: #e2388f;
--accent-3: #b8963e;
--accent-4: #5b4486;
--font-display: "Archivo Black", 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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Post-Punk Record Sleeve
- Surrealist Graphics Pairs well · Vaughan Oliver drew on Dalí and Surrealism; add an uncanny juxtaposition to a blurred, textured 23 Envelope photograph for a dream-like sleeve.
- Die Neue Typographie Pairs well · Saville's model: borrow Tschichold's asymmetric placement and small sans-serif capitals, then replace his photographs with one quoted image to get a cool, ordered sleeve.
- Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography 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.
- Afrobeat Sleeve Art Contrasts · Lemi Ghariokwu's sleeves fill every inch to state the record's argument, while post-punk sleeves leave the name off and say nothing; use the pair to decide how much a cover should explain.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Pairs well · Both let one image or word stand on an empty field; minimalism keeps it calm and neutral, post-punk adds a borrowed image, a code and a darker mood.
- Punk & DIY Zine Contrasts · Same scene, opposite means: punk pasted ransom-note collage onto photocopies, post-punk withheld text and printed one quoted image offset on special stock; choose between shouting and withholding.
- Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve Contrasts · The generation that made it look dated: post-punk designers quoted one found image and coded or shrank the type, where Hipgnosis paid for elaborate location shoots and darkroom work. Choose between quoting a picture and staging one.
- 2 Tone Graphics Contrasts · Shares restraint and a single focal point, but swaps abstraction for a cartoon mascot.
With Vorticism
- London Transport Design Pairs well · Set a Vorticist field of angular planes under calm, evenly spaced lettering for a poster that has machine-age energy but still reads as a public service.
- Italian Futurism Contrasts · Its parent scatters words in freedom along curves and diagonals; Vorticism keeps the same shouting sizes on level, stacked lines, so decide whether the page should explode or stand like a wall.
- Arts & Crafts Movement Contrasts · BLAST refused 'a revival of lost folk art' and blasted the 'years 1837 to 1900'; set its hard black shards against a hand-printed floral page to stage machine against handicraft.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Use BLAST's blast-and-bless lists, vertical rules and boxed numbers as the skeleton of a manifesto zine, then photocopy it so the heavy caps fill in and roughen.
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Both shout in bold grotesque capitals with heavy rules; add Constructivist photomontage and a red second ink when a Vorticist page has to sell one clear message rather than a list of quarrels.
- Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22) Contrasts · Both set heavy jobbing grotesque with thick rules and bars in a little magazine, BLAST in 1914 and Klaxon in 1922; BLAST shouts lists beside machine abstractions, Klaxon keeps one quiet cover forme, jokes about the sonnet trade and draws figures in contour.