Style combination · Contrasts
Art Nouveau × Cubist Pictorial Space
Set faceted, straight-edged planes against a single whiplash curve to dramatise the break with organic ornament.
Mix them and make something Art Nouveau Cubist Pictorial Space
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.
Art Nouveau Cubist Pictorial Space
- Type from Art Nouveau
- Colour from Cubist Pictorial Space
- Form from Art Nouveau
- Composition from Art Nouveau
- Surface from Cubist Pictorial Space
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Cubist Pictorial Space
The pictorial revolution of Picasso and Braque that shattered single-point perspective into overlapping, faceted planes seen from several viewpoints at once. Through papier collé and stencilled lettering it brought real printed matter and type onto the picture plane, handing graphic design the fragment, the shallow layered plane and collage as working tools.
Newsreader; Cubist Pictorial Space used Sign-painters' stencilled capitals and Clipped newspaper mastheads and headline grotesques
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Cubist Pictorial Space, with a counter-accent from Art Nouveau. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Art Nouveau Cubist Pictorial Space
-
#e6dcc3ground · 36% -
#2a241dink · 14% -
#8b6b3eaccent · 18% -
#c9a24baccent · 14% -
#c9b48aaccent · 10% -
#3f7a75accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #e6dcc3;
--ink: #2a241d;
--accent-1: #8b6b3e;
--accent-2: #c9a24b;
--accent-3: #c9b48a;
--accent-4: #3f7a75;
--font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Art Nouveau
- Fileteado Porteño Pairs well · Fileteado's acanthus scrolls share the whiplash; combine them for ornate, hand-made lettering frames.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Ornamental curves against an orthogonal grid make a strong deliberate tension; let one botanical flourish break a cold grid.
- Psychedelic Poster Pairs well · San Francisco poster artists lifted Mucha's figures and whiplash wholesale; push the curves into saturated, vibrating colour for a 1960s-flavoured revival.
- Russian Constructivism Contrasts · Organic sensuality versus machine-age diagonals: use the opposition to stage nature against industry.
- Vienna Secession Contrasts · Set French whiplash against the Viennese square to show the turn from organic to geometric ornament within one decorative idiom.
- Skønvirke (Danish Art Nouveau, Bindesbøll) Contrasts · Shares the hand-lettering and abundance but swaps the whiplash line and the female figure for blunt abstract masses; set side by side they show the heavy Danish variant.
- Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Contrasts · The parent's smooth whiplash and floral harmony is exactly what the gouge splinters; use one against the other to stage order breaking down.
- Beggarstaffs Poster (Nicholson & Pryde) Contrasts · Its curving floral line is the opposite of cut masses; set side by side to show how much a poster can drop.
With Cubist Pictorial Space
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print synthetic-Cubist planes as overlapping flat riso inks so the overprints do the faceting for you.
- Art Deco Pairs well · Fracture a Deco poster subject into crisp Cubist planes, as Cassandre did, to add depth and movement without losing polish.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Contrasts · Isotype shows one thing from one view, Cubism one thing from many; choose Cubist fragmentation only when ambiguity is the point.
- Woodland School (Legend Painting) Pairs well · Daphne Odjig took the overlapping planes of the Cubism she encountered in Toronto into her own curving, strongly outlined Woodland painting; when a layout wants overlapping flat planes, overlap type and colour panels around a commissioned Woodland image rather than imitating her hand.
- Chaekgeori & Minhwa Screen Painting Pairs well · Chaekgeori already shows objects from several viewpoints at once; borrow Cubist faceting to push its tilted shelves further, or cite chaekgeori as an East Asian precedent for multi-view still life.
- Low Poly Illustration Contrasts · Cubism breaks an object into planes seen from several viewpoints at once and flattens the space; low poly facets it from one consistent viewpoint and keeps the perspective. Borrow Cubist overlap only when ambiguity, not legibility, is the point.