Style combination · Pairs well
Angura Theatre Poster × Mavo
Two Tokyo undergrounds forty years apart: put Mavo's black-and-white newsprint collage and boxed text under Angura's flood of screenprinted colour for an anti-establishment poster with a longer memory.
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.
Angura Theatre Poster Mavo
- Type from Mavo
- Colour from Angura Theatre Poster
- Form from Mavo
- Composition from Angura Theatre Poster
- Surface from Mavo
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Angura Theatre Poster
The posters of Japan's underground (angura) theatre from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, made for troupes such as Kara Jūrō's Jōkyō Gekijō and Terayama Shūji's Tenjō Sajiki. Tadanori Yokoo, Akira Uno, Kiyoshi Awazu and others crammed silkscreen sheets with Meiji and Shōwa photographs, rising-sun rays, Mount Fuji, ukiyo-e waves and comic-strip figures in flat, often fluorescent colour, mocking prewar kitsch and the restraint of Japanese corporate modernism at once.
Shippori Mincho; Angura Theatre Poster used Hand-drawn and brush-written Japanese titles set vertically and Retro Meiji–Shōwa display lettering lifted from found print
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Angura Theatre Poster, with a counter-accent from Mavo. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Angura Theatre Poster Mavo
-
#ffd400ground · 36% -
#1a1a1aink · 14% -
#e8352aaccent · 18% -
#3fa9f5accent · 14% -
#dbb13aaccent · 10% -
#ff4f9aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ffd400;
--ink: #1a1a1a;
--accent-1: #e8352a;
--accent-2: #3fa9f5;
--accent-3: #dbb13a;
--accent-4: #ff4f9a;
--font-display: "Big Shoulders", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}Use it with care
Angura Theatre Poster: Rising-sun rays quote the ensign of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, which many people in Korea, China and across Asia read as a symbol of wartime aggression; Yokoo's ironic use belonged to a 1960s Japanese argument with its own past and does not travel safely as a decorative sunburst. The ero-guro imagery includes sexualised and violent bodies, and the posters remain in copyright, so quote or license them with context rather than tracing them.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Angura Theatre Poster
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Yokoo started from Push Pin's illustrated eclecticism; pair Push Pin's period-pastiche lettering with angura's crowded Japanese ephemera.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Contrasts · Angura rebelled against the Nippon Design Center generation's restraint; set an emblem-and-void poster beside a packed angura sheet to tune between order and overload.
- Psychedelic Poster Pairs well · Yokoo's late-1960s posters met San Francisco psychedelia halfway; combine fluorescent colour with Japanese found imagery rather than Art Nouveau curls.
- Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration Pairs well · Angura recycled Meiji and Taishō imagery as found material; cut a Taishō beauty into an angura collage for ironic retro nostalgia.
- La Movida Madrileña Graphics Contrasts · Both cram comic figures and their own country's imagery into flat, saturated colour with irony; Japan's angura posters were silkscreened for underground theatre from the mid-1960s, packed edge to edge with Meiji and Shōwa photographs, rising-sun rays and Mount Fuji around a central axis, while the Movida came after Franco's death and drew comics, hand lettering and cut-out photographs of its own people for magazines, bands and films.
- Garo and Heta-uma (Japanese Underground Manga and 'Bad-Good' Illustration) Pairs well · Both are 1960s-70s Tokyo underground print; set crude Garo-style figures against angura's crowded silkscreen colour.
- Superflat Contrasts · Both quote ukiyo-e and Pop from Japan, but angura crams photographs and fluorescent silkscreen into a rebellious collage while Superflat draws everything smooth and flat; set one flat Superflat character against an angura photomontage for a clash of eras.
- Tropicália Graphic Design Contrasts · The atlas's nearest genome and an exact contemporary: both mock national kitsch with photomontage, sun rays and crowded flat colour, but angura posters screenprint nostalgic Meiji and Shōwa photographs in fluorescent ink, while Tropicália offset-prints a photograph of the singer amid tropical flora and the flag's green and yellow.
With Mavo
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Borrow Constructivism's heavy bars and one red ink to steady a Mavo page, but keep Mavo's hand-drawn characters and abstract machine linocuts instead of a single clear slogan.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Contrasts · Postwar Japanese modernism keeps one emblem in wide white space; Mavo fills every compartment, so choose between calm authority and a crowded, shouting page.
- Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration Contrasts · The same Taishō Tokyo in two moods: pastel lyrical illustration of modern girls against Mavo's black linocuts, newsprint and price tags.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Both paste real ephemera into a cheap, self-published magazine; give a punk zine Mavo's black boxing rules, a hand-cut linocut and one line of text turned sideways.
- Die Neue Typographie Contrasts · Murayama quoted Moholy-Nagy, yet Mavo refused the objective, standardized type the New Typography preached; set a calm sans-serif page against one Mavo spread to stage order against hand-made revolt.