Style combination · Contrasts
Atelier Populaire × Situationist Détournement Graphics
Same Paris spring of 1968, opposite method: the Atelier populaire drew new figures and slogans and screenprinted them flat in one colour, while the situationists reused existing comics, photographs and texts. Draw when the message must read from across the street, détourn when the audience must recognise the source.
Mix them and make something Atelier Populaire Situationist Détournement Graphics
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.
Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Situationist Détournement Graphics
- Type from Atelier Populaire
- Colour from Atelier Populaire
- Form from Atelier Populaire
- Composition from Situationist Détournement Graphics
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Atelier Populaire avoids collage & layering: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Surface from Situationist Détournement Graphics
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Atelier Populaire avoids halftone & ben-day dots: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Atelier Populaire
Loud
Permanent Marker; 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
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Atelier Populaire, with a counter-accent from Situationist Détournement Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Situationist Détournement Graphics
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#f2eee3ground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#cf2027accent · 18% -
#e08a2caccent · 14% -
#23408eaccent · 10% -
#b4875aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2eee3;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #cf2027;
--accent-2: #e08a2c;
--accent-3: #23408e;
--accent-4: #b4875a;
--font-display: "Permanent Marker", cursive;
--font-text: "Courier Prime", monospace;
}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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Atelier Populaire
- South African Resistance Poster Pairs well · Both chose hand-made silkscreen because it was cheap, quick and teachable to non-artists; borrow the struggle posters' organisation emblems and second ink when a campaign must stay recognisable beyond one day's slogan.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Contrasts · Same decade, opposite means: ICAIC's silkscreened film posters and OSPAAAL's mostly offset solidarity posters were polished, many-coloured and made to last, while the Atelier's one anonymous ink was pulled overnight for the next morning's wall; decide which of the two the brief needs.
- Polish Poster School Contrasts · Polish posters are signed painterly metaphors by named authors, while the Atelier stripped away signature and painterly finish; a recognisable individual hand breaks its collective voice.
- ROSTA Windows Pairs well · Like the ROSTA windows, each sheet answers the day's news by hand with a stark figure and a caption; run single posters as a numbered sequence when one image cannot tell the whole story.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · The House of European History traces a line from these posters to Jamie Reid's Sex Pistols graphics; set one brushed slogan in a single ink against xerox cut-up for a flyer with the same anti-authority bite.
- See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints Contrasts · 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.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Contrasts · The founders came out of the 1968 workshops, but the Beaux-Arts atelier pulled one flat ink, one brushed silhouette and a slogan in rough capitals; Grapus layers photographs, paint and coloured handwriting, mostly on white. Use the first for overnight urgency, Grapus for a warmer, longer campaign.
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Contrasts · Both answered a crisis with overnight slogans on the street, but the May '68 posters were brushed by hand and pulled in one ink, while most ACT UP and Gran Fury posters were professionally printed in offset and modelled on advertising; choose rough urgency or seductive polish before mixing them.
With Situationist Détournement Graphics
- Punk & DIY Zine Contrasts · Punk reprised the situationist prank in the late 1970s, but it packs torn photocopies and mixed type into crowded pages; détournement keeps a few recognisable fragments and lets each one say the opposite of what it said. Borrow the rewritten balloon when a punk layout needs a sharper argument.
- Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance) Pairs well · The photo-romance was a raw material René Viénet named in Internationale situationniste no. 11 (1967), calling for photo-romances to be détourned by adding or altering their speech bubbles: keep the photographed lovers and the grid of frames untouched and change only the balloons, so that the melodrama speaks against itself.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Pairs well · Mass-market comic panels were a favourite raw material of détournement: keep the drawing of an adventure or western panel untouched and rewrite only the balloons to turn it against its own story.
- Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Pairs well · Image macros and reaction memes recaption a known picture to say something new, which is détournement by other means; set a situationist rewritten balloon in a meme layout to bring the method online.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Both took comic panels and advertisements in the same years, but Lichtenstein enlarged a single panel to painting size as a close copy of what it already said, while détournement kept the panel at reading size and rewrote its balloon to argue against its source; the SI's English section called Pop art 'the last ditch attempt to shore up the decomposition of the spectacle' (1967). Enlarge when the source itself is the subject, rewrite when the message must turn on the source.
- ACT UP & Gran Fury AIDS Activist Graphics Contrasts · Gran Fury placed its work 'in direct line of descent with Situationist questions' and kept the hijacking of mass media, but it copied whole advertising formats (a Benetton campaign, the front page of The New York Times) in professional offset with staged photographs and one-line slogans, where the situationists scattered cut fragments under ink. Copy the format whole when the work must pass for the real thing in public space; cut it up when the reader should see the seams.
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas) Contrasts · Contemporaries who both took found pictures, but Maciunas packed them into a tight, deadpan black grid of mixed dry-transfer type, while Debord and Jorn scattered fragments under painted ink and aimed the joke at revolution; choose order or drift.
- Il Male Newspaper-Forgery Satire Pairs well · Take the cut-up method and add the dense tabloid page to turn theory into a prank.