Style combination · Contrasts

Atelier Populaire × French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster

The same Paris walls twenty years apart: the gag poster sells a product with one good-natured colour-lithograph joke, while the 1968 students' one-colour screenprints turn the same single image and hand-lettered slogan to agitation.

From the research on French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan)

Mix them and make something Atelier Populaire French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster, their arrangement from Atelier Populaire, the finish from Atelier Populaire. 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.

Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan)

Type from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster: Hand-lettering
All caps
Colour from Atelier Populaire: Monochrome
Flat fields
Form from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Atelier Populaire: Isolated object
Single focal point
Surface from Atelier Populaire: Painterly brushwork
Flat

The type

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

Display · French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster

Hello

Londrina Solid; French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster used Brand name painted by the artist into the picture, often in bold sans capitals on the product itself and Roman capitals over a lowercase italic line, lettered on the product

Text · Atelier Populaire

The posters of the Atelier populaire, set up when students, teachers and artists occupied the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris on 14 May 1968, until police cleared the school on 27 June. Designs were voted on at evening assemblies, left unsigned and pulled on improvised silkscreens: one flat ink on cheap or donated paper, a single brushed silhouette (a riot policeman, de Gaulle, a factory) and a short punning slogan in rough capitals, pasted up across Paris overnight.

Oswald; Atelier Populaire used Brushed letters, left open on the silk while gum arabic is painted around them to block the screen, so the edges stay ragged and uneven and Wall-slogan handwriting of May '68, lifted from graffiti and marches

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Atelier Populaire, with a counter-accent from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan)

#f2eee3 ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#cf2027 accent · 18%
#23408e accent · 14%
#f3c63a accent · 10%
#b4875a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2eee3;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #cf2027;
  --accent-2: #23408e;
  --accent-3: #f3c63a;
  --accent-4: #b4875a;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster): The posters were made anonymously and given away, and some equate the police or de Gaulle with the Nazis (the SS on a riot policeman's shield, popularly 'CRS SS'; Hitler holding a de Gaulle mask); do not attribute them to individual designers, sell pastiches as May '68 originals, or aim those Nazi comparisons at real people today without that history in view. 'Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands' answered antisemitic attacks on Cohn-Bendit's origins (the far-right press smeared him as a Marxist German Jew, and Georges Marchais wrote in L'Humanité of 'the German anarchist'); do not reuse it, or the 'indésirables' poster, as a generic 'we are all X' template without that history.

French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan): Savignac, Villemot, Morvan and Carlu are in copyright (Adagp, Paris), and some of their images are still brand property: Savignac's Bic boy is part of the BIC logo, and Orangina reissued Villemot's zest parasol on its bottles in 2011. Invent your own gag for your own product rather than redrawing the Monsavon cow, the Maggi ox or the Bic boy, do not prompt an image model for a named affichiste's hand, and never present a generated image as a vintage affiche.

The two styles

1968 · Western Europe Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) The posters of the Atelier populaire, set up when students, teachers and artists occupied the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris on 14 May 1968, until police cleared the school on 27 June. Designs were voted on at evening assemblies, left unsigned and pulled on improvised silkscreens: one flat ink on cheap or donated paper, a single brushed silhouette (a riot policeman, de Gaulle, a factory) and a short punning slogan in rough capitals, pasted up across Paris overnight.

A stylised woman with short black hair sits with her knees raised, wearing a blue swimsuit and holding a yellow drink with a red-and-white striped straw. Above her, large hand-painted letters read “SOLEILADE,” with the yellow O surrounded by sun rays on a cream background.

1948–1979 · Western Europe French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) The humorous street poster of post-war Paris, which took off in 1949 when Raymond Savignac and Bernard Villemot showed their rejected projects together and Savignac's Monsavon cow, its udder filling a bar of soap, went up on the walls. With Hervé Morvan they reduced each advertisement to one cartoon gag whose punchline is the product: a stylised figure brushed in a few bright colours on a plain ground, the brand name drawn into the picture and almost no other copy, printed as large colour lithographs until agency photography pushed it aside in the 1970s.