Style combination · Pairs well
Atelier Populaire × Solidarność
Both made anonymous protest prints on whatever press was to hand in one or two inks; borrow the Atelier's single brushed silhouette to give a crowded Solidarity-style word a figure to stand beside.
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) Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics
- Type from Solidarność
- Colour from Atelier Populaire
- Form from Solidarność
- Composition from Atelier Populaire
- Surface from Atelier Populaire
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Solidarność
Rise
Londrina Solid, standing in for Red hand-drawn capitals on amateur posters of the 1989 election campaign, such as Chylak's 'Głosuj na Solidarność'
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Atelier Populaire, with a counter-accent from Solidarność. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics
-
#f2eee3ground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#cf2027accent · 18% -
#23408eaccent · 14% -
#a5835caccent · 10% -
#3f7a3caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2eee3;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #cf2027;
--accent-2: #23408e;
--accent-3: #a5835c;
--accent-4: #3f7a3c;
--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.
Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics: This is still a living, contested sign: the NSZZ Solidarność union claims the logo, and a Gdańsk court awarded it the copyright and barred Janiszewski from licensing it, a ruling the Warsaw Court of Appeal upheld (reported in November 2025), while Fydrych won a copyright case over his Orange Alternative dwarf against the city of Wrocław in 2014; do not reuse the logo, or a pastiche of it, for a brand or campaign as if it were public domain. The iconography also carries Catholic symbols and the memory of people killed under martial law and after it (the nine Wujek miners shot in December 1981; Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, murdered by security-service officers in October 1984). Solidaryca is still used for logos and slogans about Poland, freedom and democracy, its designer has criticised its exploitation by right-wing groups, and the union itself has grown increasingly aligned with Law and Justice, so do not use the cross, the candles or the lettering as decoration or to suggest an endorsement nobody gave.
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 Solidarność
- Extinction Rebellion Graphics Pairs well · A later movement that also lives on one simple mark anyone can copy by hand; pair a single shared emblem with locally made, cheaply printed posters to keep a campaign recognisable without central design.
- Punk & DIY Zine Contrasts · Same years and the same cheap reproduction, opposite temper: punk defaces the flag and the monarch with ransom-note collage, while Solidarity graphics carry the flag and the cross with reverence and keep to one disciplined hand-drawn word.
- NSK Retro-Avant-Garde Contrasts · Both answered a socialist state in the 1980s, but NSK impersonates power in solemn, centred heraldry, while the Polish underground mocked it with jokes, and the Orange Alternative with dwarfs, and Solidarity kept its reverence for church and nation; choose between over-identifying and laughing.
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · As the V&A notes, Janiszewski replaced the socialist motif of a leader conducting the crowd with the national flag; set a crowd of equal letters against one heroic leader to make that point.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Pairs well · Opposite sides of the communist divide but the same Polish poster lineage: Janiszewski's crowded red letters and Grapus's loose handwriting both make a movement's voice look written by people, not set by an office.
- Latin American Feminist Protest Graphics (Ni Una Menos and the Green Wave) Contrasts · Both are movement identities copied by hand in the street, but Solidarność gathered behind one logo of crowded red letters and printed posters, bulletins and stamps, while the green wave gathers behind a wearable cloth and a colour; letters as the sign against an object as the sign.
- Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives) Contrasts · Both made hand-lettered protest banners and cheap copies and answered force with irony, but Solidarność gathered under one logotype and a union, where these sheets were signed only by a town or a collective, bilingual and made for the feed; set them side by side to weigh one shared mark against many local, dated voices.
- Belarusian Protest Illustration (2020 Uprising) Contrasts · Both activate red-white national references, but the Belarusian sample places figures and visual metaphors ahead of the tightly joined lettering that defines Solidarność. Compare the role of a shared flag with that of a shared wordmark; do not infer a direct lineage.