Style combination · Pairs well

AIZ Political Photomontage × Situationist Détournement Graphics

Both turn the opponent's own words and pictures against their source; take détournement's scattered press fragments and rewritten speech balloons for a looser, cheaper attack, and AIZ's seamless single picture when the charge must look like a photograph of fact.

From the research on AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield)

Mix them and make something AIZ Political Photomontage Situationist Détournement Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from AIZ Political Photomontage, their arrangement from Situationist Détournement Graphics, the finish from Situationist Détournement Graphics. 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.

AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Situationist Détournement Graphics

Type from AIZ Political Photomontage: Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Geometric sans
Colour from AIZ Political Photomontage: Monochrome
Gradients
Form from AIZ Political Photomontage: Naturalistic depiction
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Situationist Détournement Graphics: Collage & layering
Framed panels

AIZ Political Photomontage avoids collage & layering: this is where the two pull against each other.
Surface from Situationist Détournement Graphics: Halftone & Ben-Day dots
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · AIZ Political Photomontage

Wow.

Jost, standing in for Bold geometric or grotesque sans capitals of the Erbar, Kabel or Futura kind, with round C and G, for the headline, stacked above the picture ('DER SINN DES HITLERGRUSSES:', AIZ cover, 16 October 1932; 'BLUT UND EISEN', 1934) or widely letterspaced across the foot of a spread ('KRIEG UND LEICHEN – DIE LETZTE HOFFNUNG DER REICHEN', 1932)

Text · Situationist Détournement Graphics

Graphics of the Letterist and Situationist Internationals (1956–1972), built on détournement: taking existing words and pictures (comic strips, advertisements, news photographs, city maps, classic texts) and turning them against their source. Debord and Jorn scattered cut press fragments among splashes of coloured ink in the artist's books Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires, and cut the map of Paris into islands linked by red arrows. Strasbourg students and the CMDO refilled comic-strip balloons with theory and pasted the strips up.

Courier Prime; Situationist Détournement Graphics used Caractères Simples, a nineteenth-century French sans serif shown by Deberny, set in lowercase for the title on every issue of Internationale situationniste and Found press type

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from AIZ Political Photomontage, with a counter-accent from Situationist Détournement Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Situationist Détournement Graphics

#ede1c3 ground · 36%
#1e1a17 ink · 14%
#c6a67c accent · 18%
#e08a2c accent · 14%
#86603f accent · 10%
#c62f2a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ede1c3;
  --ink: #1e1a17;
  --accent-1: #c6a67c;
  --accent-2: #e08a2c;
  --accent-3: #86603f;
  --accent-4: #c62f2a;
  --font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Courier Prime", monospace;
}

Use it with care

AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield): The montages turn swastikas and portraits of Nazi leaders against the regime; displaying Nazi symbols is restricted by law in Germany and several other countries outside contexts such as art, satire, education and history, so keep any reuse unmistakably critical and check the rules where the work will be shown. AIZ was also a communist magazine informally financed by the Comintern: before 1933 its montages attacked the Social Democrats as well as the Nazis, and in 1934 it devoted a special issue to seventeen years of the Soviet Union, so treat the style as partisan propaganda, and do not turn its literal, accusatory montage on named living people without checking defamation and image-rights law.

The two styles

1930–1938 · Central Europe AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) The political photomontage John Heartfield made for the communist weekly AIZ from 1930 to 1938, in Berlin and, from 1933, in Prague exile. Press photographs were cut, joined, retouched with airbrush and rephotographed into one seamless, believable picture that usually takes an opponent's slogan or symbol, most often a Nazi one, literally and, less often, raises a heroic emblem such as the clenched fist. It was printed full-page in single-ink photogravure between a short headline and a deadpan caption or quotation in plain bold sans.

A distressed, torn-paper collage combines a woman holding a teacup, city highways, crowds of suited men, a shopping cart containing a house, marching soldiers, ruined buildings, a beach scene with a jet overhead, and a reclining man's face. Black-and-white photographic fragments overlap red, ochre, and blue shapes on cream paper.

1956–1972 · Western Europe, Northern Europe Situationist Détournement Graphics Graphics of the Letterist and Situationist Internationals (1956–1972), built on détournement: taking existing words and pictures (comic strips, advertisements, news photographs, city maps, classic texts) and turning them against their source. Debord and Jorn scattered cut press fragments among splashes of coloured ink in the artist's books Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires, and cut the map of Paris into islands linked by red arrows. Strasbourg students and the CMDO refilled comic-strip balloons with theory and pasted the strips up.