Bye Barbie pink, hello Brat green: You can’t escape the colour of 2024

NEW YORK – When you look back on the summer of 2024, what will you see? Green.

Not just any green, but a hue so affronting that fashion news media has described it as “noxious”, “abrasive” and the colour of “bilious sludge”. Picture Gumby with jaundice. Picture a Bottega Veneta handbag, dipped in Nickelodeon slime.

The colour entered the zeitgeist as the branding for Brat, an album released in early June by British pop provocateur Charli XCX, 31.

“It had to be really unfriendly and uncool,” the singer-songwriter has said of the album artwork, which features four blurry letters centred in a puke-green square.

But then a funny thing happened. The intentionally repulsive colour won over the internet, and then the summer, and then, at a pivotal moment, an entire presidential campaign.

In a few short days, supporters of United States Vice-President Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, memed chartreuse into an unusually potent political symbol.

Its ubiquity online makes last summer’s Barbie pink look like a light-hearted suggestion.

Charli XCX was once for the young and ironically tattooed. Now, she is being distributed to the masses.

“I will aspire to be Brat,” American journalist Jake Tapper said on CNN to a correspondent holding up a slime-green meme.

The colour and typography of Brat now appear poised to become one of the enduring visual icons of this disorienting moment in pop culture and politics.

If American artist-activist Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster of former US President Barack Obama was the lasting design of the 2008 election, the Brat album cover may be its 2024 successor: earnest, if slightly muted, red, white and blue, swopped out for a distinctly unpatriotic, uneasy digital green.

“It’s a moment,” said designer Peter Saville, who was behind the album covers of 1980s and 1970s British bands New Order and Joy Division that became signifiers of their era. “You’re talking about a temporary, autonomous moment in pop culture suddenly informing a political campaign, and a major one – a political campaign of global significance.”

What design choices got people here? Brent David Freaney, 39, founder of New York City-based studio Special Offer, explained how he and his team created the design oozing its way into the public consciousness – and maybe even the history books.

When Brat dropped, people were joking that this must have been the world’s easiest album cover to design. Was that the case?

No. We went through a five-month-long design process to get to where we arrived. It was always text, always on a green square. Charli had (done a comprehensive layout of) what she wanted and was like, “This is what I think it should be.” Truthfully, as a designer, I was a little bit like: Okay?

The challenge became: How do I take this thing and make it something that is special? It’s a painfully simple cover, obviously, and I think that lends itself to the reason it’s been recreated in so many different ways. As easy or effortless as it may seem on its face, there is a very deeply considered world in it that I think really legitimises it from a design perspective.

Where did you start? The colour?

We looked at, like, 500 different shades of green. The directive was: I don’t want this to feel like it has any taste. I want it to feel off-putting and kind of garish. Everything I started seeing in the city that was green, I started taking a photo of. If it was a sign, a traffic cone, a car, the background of an image in the New York Post.

How did you make the final call?

The final selection really came from an emotional feeling from Charli. It needed to be something that captured the energy of the record that Charli had made, something that felt very irreverent and in your face, with the same retina-burning energy that a saturated red or a saturated orange would have. And it needed to be something that couldn’t really be associated with anything else.

Where did the typography come from? Is it literally Arial?

It needed to feel like something that wasn’t precious. There’s all these Swiss typefaces and, as a designer, I’m always like, how do you beat Helvetica? We looked at so many different things, and it ended up being a combination, but the base of it is Arial.

There’s a stretch to it, to give it a personality. And it’s kind of awkwardly placed on the cover – it could have been very small and tasteful or very large and loud. To have it not go one way or the other, it’s almost opinionless, which I think is a really important part of the energy behind it.

Did you ever imagine that you would wind up doing the de facto branding for Ms Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign?

Did not see that one coming! I think that fan culture created and runs the internet. What creates a movement is when there are real people and they are really into something. There must be someone on Ms Harris’ team who is a Charli stan. There’s this thing right now where we want to be excited about something, in this insane, dystopian world we’re living in.

When people look back on this summer, what kind of energy do you think Brat green will come to represent?

That is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. There’s an irreverence about summer, and this feeling of just going crazy. I really hope that the legacy of the album, besides Charli XCX’s amazing music, is that it conjures the feeling of freedom. I think the wave of green that has sort of taken over is because it’s a party and it feels wild. This is not millennial pink. The energy behind it is alive. NYTIMES