Style combination · Contrasts

Atelier Populaire × See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints

Both are collective, unsigned screenprints, but May '68 shouts one emblem and a strike slogan, while See Red tells a small domestic story with a wry caption.

From the research on See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints

Mix them and make something Atelier Populaire See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Atelier Populaire, 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) See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints

Type from See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints: Hand-lettering
All caps
Colour from See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Atelier Populaire: 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 · See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints

Wake

Londrina Solid, standing in for Comic-strip captions and speech balloons in hand-lettered capitals (My Wife Doesn't Work, 1980)

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 See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints, with a counter-accent from Atelier Populaire. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints

#f4f0e6 ground · 36%
#151515 ink · 14%
#d4262a accent · 18%
#1f2f6b accent · 14%
#8fb4d4 accent · 10%
#6b4a2e accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f4f0e6;
  --ink: #151515;
  --accent-1: #d4262a;
  --accent-2: #1f2f6b;
  --accent-3: #8fb4d4;
  --accent-4: #6b4a2e;
  --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.

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.

The red word “ENOUGH” spans the top of a cream poster above a large red woman in an apron raising a cloth overhead. Repeated black illustrations of women washing dishes surround her.

1974–1990 · Western Europe See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints Screenprinted posters of a London feminist collective founded in 1974 to answer negative images of women in advertising and the media, designed and approved by the group and credited to no one member. In a few flat inks, drawn or photographic housewives, mothers and workers repeat across cells and strips or stand under a wry slogan, turning housework, childcare and the double shift into agitation. From the late 1970s posters also took on racism, Irish and international struggles and lesbian sexuality, some in photomontage. No new designs after 1984; closed 1990.