Style combination · Contrasts
Punk × See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints
Same London years and anger, but See Red prints carefully in flat ink where punk photocopies and tears.
Mix them and make something Punk See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints
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.
Punk & DIY Zine See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints
- Type from See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints
- Colour from See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints
- Form from Punk
- Composition from Punk
- Surface from Punk
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See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints avoids photocopy & distress: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints
Noise
Londrina Solid, standing in for Comic-strip captions and speech balloons in hand-lettered capitals (My Wife Doesn't Work, 1980)
Text · Punk
The graphic voice of punk rock in fanzines, record sleeves and gig flyers: images and words cut from newspapers, typed or scrawled, pasted down and run off on a photocopier. Deliberate crudeness, ransom-note lettering and hijacked mass-media imagery turned cheap reproduction into an anti-professional statement of autonomy and dissent.
Courier Prime; Punk used Ransom-note cut-out lettering and Typewriter faces
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints, with a counter-accent from Punk. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Punk & DIY Zine See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints
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#f4f0e6ground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#d4262aaccent · 18% -
#ff2fa0accent · 14% -
#1f2f6baccent · 10% -
#8fb4d4accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4f0e6;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #d4262a;
--accent-2: #ff2fa0;
--accent-3: #1f2f6b;
--accent-4: #8fb4d4;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Courier Prime", monospace;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Punk
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Borrow Constructivist diagonals and red-and-black bars to give punk collage the agitprop structure post-punk sleeves later adopted.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Run punk collages through a riso in fluoro pink and black to keep the DIY ethic while gaining richer, layered colour.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Deface a clean corporate identity with xerox collage to make the critique of polish and authority explicit.
- Frutiger Aero Contrasts · Glossy optimism is everything punk rejects; one torn xerox fragment on an aero gradient reads as instant sabotage.
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas) Contrasts · Both mix found type with appropriated pictures, but punk tears and photocopies while Fluxus keeps a clean offset black, justified blocks and a tight edge-to-edge grid; use the Fluxus version when cheap materials should still look ordered.
- Natural Wine Label Art Pairs well · Alice Feiring calls the earlier natural-wine scene punk rock: of Gut Oggau she says 'This is where things grow up and stop being so punk rock' (Punch, 2021). Take punk's refusal of professional polish but drop the collage and the anger: one felt-pen picture on a white label carries the same do-it-yourself stance in a friendlier voice.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Contrasts · Both scribble over photographs, but punk's photocopied blacks and ransom-note type are cheap and nihilist, while Grapus prints bright offset colour, mostly on white, in an optimistic, party-backed voice.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Contrasts · Punk reprised the situationist prank in the late 1970s, but it packs torn photocopies and mixed type into crowded pages; détournement keeps a few recognisable fragments and lets each one say the opposite of what it said. Borrow the rewritten balloon when a punk layout needs a sharper argument.
With See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints
- Underground Comix Pairs well · Borrow the comic strip and speech balloon, but cleaned up into a few flat inks and turned against the sexism much of the comix canon traded in.
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Contrasts · Both are collective, unsigned screenprints, but May '68 shouts one emblem and a strike slogan, while See Red tells a small domestic story with a wry caption.
- Australian Poster Collective Screenprints Pairs well · Sister screenprint collectives of the same years; add their brighter inks and halftone for a louder campaign poster.
- South African Resistance Poster Pairs well · Community silkscreen for movements; add its heavy slogans and organisation emblems to See Red's drawn everyday scenes.