Web design inspiration from retro wrestling posters

It’s something of a cliché that a generation of British kids grew up with an aunt or grandmother who’d be glued to the television set every Saturday watching teatime wrestling. But it’s also easy to underestimate just how popular British wrestling was in the 1970s and ’80s and how long before the popularity of American wrestling, the sport made household names of Dynamite Kid, Kendo Nagasaki, Mick McManus, Giant Haystacks, and “the people’s favorite” Big Daddy.

Wrestling was a cultural phenomenon, with millions tuning in each week to see their favorite grapplers dropkick, headbutt, and splash their opponents. Between televised bouts, matches were held up and down the country in civic centers, theaters, and town halls. Bobby Bold Eagle and Cherokee Billy battled King Kong Kirk, who fought Rollerball Rocco, who grappled with Cyanide Sid Cooper. And to promote these contests, promoters and venues produced posters to attract fight fans.

Let’s explore what contemporary web designers can learn from these retro wrestling posters.

Unlike the wrestlers they featured, there was nothing flamboyant about those retro wrestling posters. The typography had no frills, with brash sans-serifs and a heavy use of hierarchy. The top spots and the largest type were reserved for the biggest stars, like Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, followed by their supporting acts.

Black-and-white photographs of the wrestling stars were often crudely cut out and set into modular grids, emphasizing the hierarchy. Content was separated by heavyweight lines. Only two colors were used to keep printing costs low, with an eye-catching red tag teaming with black.

Posters like these were a common sight in towns and cities across the country, sharing wall space with posters for gigs and the protest movements of the late 1970s and early ’80s. With their attention-grabbing style, limited color palettes, punchy typography, and strong visual hierarchy, they’re part of a tradition that includes woodblock posters for concerts, country fairs, and theater shows like these, still made in Nashville today by Hatch Show Print.

With the big names set in bigger type, modular layouts, and an emphasis on impact instead of elegance, these posters are part of a visual lineage which includes more contemporary work like these iconic posters designed for New York’s Public Theater by American graphic designer Paula Scher.

The brief: My client, The Daily Grind, is a coffee company that organizes an annual conference for baristas called Caffeine Conf. They wanted a brash, disruptive design to attract people to their upcoming event, where speakers like Maisy Mocha, Carl Nitro, and“Double Shot” Derek Dynamite will share their experience. The Daily Grind isn’t an actual client. However, the creative challenges and the decisions involved in designing a project like this are real.

I ask my clients to describe the personality of their audience. Some people call that a “user persona,” but I just call it a portrait. The customer for Caffeine Conf is eager to learn and motivated to become the best in the business. They’re competitive but sociable, and sadly, unlike me, they’re not old enough to remember Saturday teatime wrestling.

At first glance, a sensational tag team poster might not seem like a blueprint for a coffee conference website, but its boldness and structure have hidden potential.

Wrestling poster designers didn’t carve letters in wood or use wooden blocks for printing. But the heavyweight sans-serif typefaces they chose were just as characterful with their minimal ornamentation and thick strokes. They needed to pack in plenty of information while maintaining maximum legibility, so they frequently chose typefaces with a condensed style.

The Daily Grind and I wanted to evoke the feel of a wrestling poster without producing a pastiche. I explored various narrow sans-serif typefaces, looking for one that balanced legibility with visual impact, before choosing Monte Stella by Dalton Maag. It’s a display sans typeface, and the designers have deliberately included imperfections which perfectly suit the poster feel I was aiming to create.

When evaluating a typeface, it’s essential to study its letterform designs closely. So, I create type sheets with letters of several sizes, from very large to extremely small. The Monte Stella type family includes weights from light to heavy, which allows me to use weight and size to create my typographic hierarchy.

The content of a wrestling poster was packed tighter than Big Daddy’s leotard. Still, modular grids and clever line work defined the sections and created a visual hierarchy, making the content easier to understand. 

Modules are rectangles or square units, and modular grids arrange them horizontally and vertically, bringing order to large amounts of varied content. I can use individual modulars or bind them together to create larger spatial zones.

Larger spatial zones should be reserved for content at the top of the hierarchy, with smaller zones available for progressively less critical content. So, while every speaker at Caffeine Conf is worth listening to, The Daily Grind is banking on Maisy Mocha bringing in the big crowds.

A structured grid brings order, and a strong typographic hierarchy tells readers which content to pay attention to first. Even when there’s nothing but type on a page, this combination clearly communicates the order in which they should consume the content.

The Daily Grind and I wanted to include high-contrast cut-out portraits of the conference’s keynote speakers. Modular grids are especially effective for informing the placement and size of elements within a composition.

Borders, dividers, and other separators are integral to the poster design aesthetic and help to define content areas, bringing clarity to a composition. Adding borders closes off the space around Caffeine Conf’s lesser-known speakers, while opening it wide around Maisy Mocha’s name and portrait gives them extra prominence.

Line thickness can have a powerful effect on how a design is perceived. Thicker lines feel confident and strong. They attract attention, and because they suggest importance, we can use them to anchor key elements or separate critical content areas. Thinner lines feel lighter, more refined, and less obtrusive. They add detail and divide content without overwhelming a layout.

Color choices can subtly shift the mood of a design, and reflecting a brand sometimes means adapting inspiration rather than simply copying it.

Despite being limited by printing costs, color gave wrestling posters a personality as confident as those who stepped into the ring. They were primarily black and white, with a blue or red accent used to highlight wrestler names and their matching details.

The Daily Grind wanted to limit the colors used in their Caffeine Conf design. I experimented with alternating blue and red accents, but the result was out of keeping with the visual identity we’d previously defined for their brand, so I decided to take a different approach.

I was reluctant to let go of the red accent, which is so evocative of those retro wrestling posters. I had to remind myself that it was their style that inspired me, and I wasn’t producing a pastiche. So I replaced it with The Daily Grind’s signature orange, punchy and packed with their personality.

Wrestling poster design evolved, and designers could afford to use more colors as printing technologies changed. Designs included extra graphic elements and more varied typefaces and styles, making them look more contemporary yet less evocative. They became more technically sophisticated but less stylish.

My design for The Daily Grind’s Caffeine Conf was inspired by the most memorable aspects of retro wrestling poster design. I structured the pages using a modular grid to create a strong visual hierarchy and used dividers to define spatial zones and guide the viewer’s eye across the composition.

I retained the monochrome images and tinted them with orange to connect them with The Daily Grind’s signature orange, which floods the header and footer. The line work is bold, with thicker lines separating sections and thinner lines dividing content within sections.

Then, I added a supporting typeface to make pages with plenty of running text more readable. Most importantly, by adapting the lessons I learned from retro wrestling posters, I created a design that feels fresh, functional, and unmistakably from The Daily Grind.

The spirit of retro wrestling posters isn’t trapped in the past. It’s alive and well when we use bold typography, confident color choices, and modular grids with a clear sense of hierarchy.

The Daily Grind’s Caffeine Conf design didn’t borrow nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It adapted lessons from a different medium into something memorable that connects with its audience.

Grappling with a design isn’t about creating a spectacle. It’s about building excitement, telling stories, and giving people something to cheer for. Whether it’s a poster or a website, the challenge remains: communicate, captivate, and make the message impossible to ignore.

Often referred to as one of the pioneers of web design, Andy Clarke has been instrumental in pushing the boundaries of web design and is known for his creative and visually stunning designs. His work has inspired countless designers to explore the full potential of product and website design.

Andy has written several industry-leading books, including Transcending CSS, Hardboiled Web Design, and Art Direction for the Web. He’s also worked with businesses of all sizes and industries to achieve their goals through design.

Visit Andy’s studio, Stuff & Nonsense, and check out his Contract Killer, the popular web design contract template trusted by thousands of web designers and developers. You can also read his articles on drawing web design inspiration from 90s cartoons, music magazines, and movie poster design.