Screenprinted Gig × Spotify Duotone Identity

Add hand-lettered, flat-ink poster drawing to recall the gig-flier roots of the look.

From the research on Spotify Duotone Identity

Mix them and make something Screenprinted Gig Spotify Duotone Identity

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Screenprinted Gig, their arrangement from Spotify Duotone Identity, the finish from Screenprinted Gig. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Spotify Duotone Identity

Type from Spotify Duotone Identity: Geometric sans
Type as image
Colour from Screenprinted Gig: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Screenprinted Gig: Stylised figuration
Restrained accents
Composition from Spotify Duotone Identity: Full bleed
Diagonal axis
Surface from Screenprinted Gig: Halftone & Ben-Day dots
Flat

The type

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

Display · Spotify Duotone Identity

Hello

Jost, standing in for Geometric sans-serifs

Text · Screenprinted Gig

Hand-pulled, numbered screenprints that revived the rock poster in Austin from 1991, led by Frank Kozik, and spread via Flatstock fairs and, from 2004, Mondo to 'alternative' film posters, for collectors as much as the show. The gig posters lean to fluorescent inks, innocent cartoons in bizarre scenes and dense psychedelic layers; the film posters, often by the same artists, to Bass-like silhouettes or a whole cast on one sheet. A few flat inks, opaque or overprinting, sometimes metallic, carry hand-drawn lettering and usually one witty idea, sweet and sinister, nostalgic and knowing.

Oswald; Screenprinted Gig used Hand-drawn display lettering by the poster artist, drawn into the image and Condensed sans-serif and wood-type-style capitals for the band, venue and date line

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Screenprinted Gig, with a counter-accent from Spotify Duotone Identity. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Spotify Duotone Identity

#1d1c1a ground · 36%
#f1ead8 ink · 14%
#f2b134 accent · 18%
#450af5 accent · 14%
#e2482f accent · 10%
#ff4f9a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #1d1c1a;
  --ink: #f1ead8;
  --accent-1: #f2b134;
  --accent-2: #450af5;
  --accent-3: #e2482f;
  --accent-4: #ff4f9a;
  --font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster: Film characters, logos and band names belong to their owners: Mondo's Star Wars and Marvel posters were made under licence from Lucasfilm and Disney, so clear the rights before printing a fan 'alt poster'; gig posters are the living trade of named independent printmakers, so commission or credit them rather than generating look-alikes of a recognisable artist's hand; and when you borrow the scene's sweet-and-sinister mix, keep the sinister half to monsters, skulls and noir rather than hate symbols or real atrocities: Kozik's own art drew on the iconography of Franco's fascist regime, under which he spent his earliest years in Spain, and that is not a costume to reuse.

The two styles

A towering teal cactus bears a large cream-and-hot-pink flower whose lower petals form a skull face. A yellow disk, desert mesas and scattered stars sit behind it on a distressed black background, beneath tall pink lettering reading “NIGHTBLOOM.”

1991–present · North America, Western Europe, Global / networked Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Hand-pulled, numbered screenprints that revived the rock poster in Austin from 1991, led by Frank Kozik, and spread via Flatstock fairs and, from 2004, Mondo to 'alternative' film posters, for collectors as much as the show. The gig posters lean to fluorescent inks, innocent cartoons in bizarre scenes and dense psychedelic layers; the film posters, often by the same artists, to Bass-like silhouettes or a whole cast on one sheet. A few flat inks, opaque or overprinting, sometimes metallic, carry hand-drawn lettering and usually one witty idea, sweet and sinister, nostalgic and knowing. 2015–present · Global / networked, Northern Europe Spotify Duotone Identity A corporate music-streaming identity from the 2015 Collins rebrand in which photographs are recoloured into two-colour images in saturated, clashing palettes, cropped at angles and set in geometric sans. Its duotone is an homage to 1960s band posters, applied by a fixed recolour filter (the Colorizer tool) to photographs rather than by a data-driven rule system, which separates it from generative identity. Palette note: green, black and white date from the 2015 identity; the other hues are from Spotify's later brand guidelines.