Style combination · Contrasts
Australian Poster Collective Screenprints × Cuban Revolutionary Poster
Cuban posters were state-commissioned single ideas; these were unsigned community jobs with text bands and local jokes, so decide whose voice the poster carries.
Mix them and make something Australian Poster Collective Screenprints Cuban Revolutionary Poster
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.
Australian Poster Collective Screenprints Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC)
- Type from Australian Poster Collective Screenprints
- Colour from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Form from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Composition from Australian Poster Collective Screenprints
- Surface from Australian Poster Collective Screenprints
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Australian Poster Collective Screenprints
Wake
Londrina Solid; Australian Poster Collective Screenprints used Hand-cut stencil lettering and Press-type (Letraset) display faces
Text · Cuban Revolutionary Poster
The poster culture of revolutionary Cuba, produced for the film institute ICAIC and the solidarity organisation OSPAAAL. With no commercial advertising and scarce materials, designers made bold silkscreen and offset posters that combined Pop and psychedelic colour, op-art pattern, flat silhouettes and single conceptual images, for cinema and for internationalist causes from Vietnam to Africa.
Archivo; Cuban Revolutionary Poster used Hand-cut silkscreen display lettering and Neo-grotesque sans captions repeated in Spanish, English, French and Arabic
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Cuban Revolutionary Poster, with a counter-accent from Australian Poster Collective Screenprints. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Australian Poster Collective Screenprints Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC)
-
#f2ede0ground · 36% -
#1c1c1cink · 14% -
#f5b81caccent · 18% -
#e3342baccent · 14% -
#ff3e8aaccent · 10% -
#2d8a57accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2ede0;
--ink: #1c1c1c;
--accent-1: #f5b81c;
--accent-2: #e3342b;
--accent-3: #ff3e8a;
--accent-4: #2d8a57;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Australian Poster Collective Screenprints: Land-rights posters were often made with or for Aboriginal organisations (the Central and Northern Land Councils, Boomalli) and can include designs, stories and clan imagery that belong to particular Aboriginal artists and communities; the Aboriginal flag was designed by Luritja artist Harold Thomas in 1971. Do not borrow Aboriginal motifs, dot or cross-hatch patterns as a 'protest look'; work with First Nations artists and organisations under protocols such as Creative Australia's Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Australian Poster Collective Screenprints
- WPA Silkscreen Posters Pairs well · An earlier public-service silkscreen tradition; combine its calm stencil figures with the collectives' fluoro colour and puns.
- Psychedelic Poster Pairs well · Early Earthworks posters grew out of psychedelic decoration; reintroduce a hand-drawn ornamental border when a hard-edged stencil feels too austere.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Today's riso studios inherit the fluoro inks, short runs and collective workshops; borrow Redback's black keyline to give riso colour more punch.
- BUGA UP Billboard Alteration Contrasts · Same Australian dissent, but studio screenprints made from scratch against alterations made on the advertiser's own board.
- See Red Women's Workshop Feminist Screenprints Pairs well · Sister screenprint collectives of the same years; add their brighter inks and halftone for a louder campaign poster.
- Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Contrasts · Both hand-pull flat, hand-lettered screenprints from the same psychedelic root and both reach for fluoro inks; the Australian collectives printed for unions, marches and community causes (and some bands), often from photo stencils, and pasted them up at night, while the gig and alt-movie poster prints for one show, one film and a collector's wall, trading agitation for wit and nostalgia.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Pairs well · Both credit a collective rather than a designer and work for unions and community clients; borrow the Australians' hand-cut screenprint stencils when a Grapus-style idea must be printed cheaply and locally.
- Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era) Contrasts · Forty years later Australian screenprint collectives pasted up land-rights, union and feminist posters that answered the official sunlit image; pair the two to show whose Australia a poster sells.
With Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · Cuba largely avoided Soviet painted realism; set a flat silhouette against a heroic painting to show abstraction carrying politics.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Militant, colourful single-image posters versus neutral corporate systems; use the Cuban mode where a cause needs urgency.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Pair Pop's flat, brand-like imagery with Cuban single-idea silhouettes for bold campaign posters.
- Gráfica del 68 (Mexican Student Movement Graphics) Contrasts · OSPAAAL and ICAIC posters were planned, many-coloured and made to last, while the 68 brigades printed one ink for the next march; choose Cuba for a solidarity campaign, 68 for an emergency.
- Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics Contrasts · ICAIC's film posters also read a film through one silhouette or pun, but in saturated, clashing screenprint colour for a revolutionary public; Bass keeps to one or two flat colours and black, and the symbol's real home is the moving title.
- Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters) Pairs well · Both are state poster programmes that took up pop and op colour; give an OSPAAAL-style single emblem Ruiz Durand's comic contour and enlarged dot ground for a campaign that must read from across a village square.
- Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP) Pairs well · Both are state-backed Caribbean silkscreen cultures for cinema and the arts, and Puerto Rico's began more than a decade before ICAIC's workshop; combine ICAIC's single conceptual image with Homar's hand-drawn Spanish lettering built into it.
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) 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.