Style combination · Pairs well
Australian Travel Poster × City Pop Illustration
Both paint idealised, sunlit leisure places under a deep blue sky; add city pop's hard-edged shadows and empty pools to an ANTA beach for a contemporary resort poster.
Mix them and make something Australian Travel Poster City Pop Illustration
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 Travel Poster (ANTA Era) City Pop Illustration
- Type from Australian Travel Poster
- Colour from City Pop Illustration
- Form from Australian Travel Poster
- Composition from City Pop Illustration
- Surface from Australian Travel Poster
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Australian Travel Poster
Rose
Poiret One, standing in for Hand-drawn Art Deco sans capitals
Text · City Pop Illustration
The painted look of Japanese city pop record sleeves and magazine covers, fixed by Hiroshi Nagai's sleeve for Eiichi Ohtaki's A Long Vacation (1981) and Eizin Suzuki's for Tatsuro Yamashita's For You (1982). Idealised, sunlit resort scenes of pools, palms, modernist villas, roadside shops and cars by the sea under a deep blue sky, built from hard-edged flat colour with Nagai's black shadows or Suzuki's clean outlines, and usually few or no people. Aspirational in Japan's boom years, it returned with the city pop revival from the 2010s and is now read as nostalgia.
Shippori Mincho; City Pop Illustration used Widely letter-spaced sans-serif capitals for title and artist, set small in the sky at the top left of the full-bleed picture, as in FOR YOU and TATSURO YAMASHITA on Suzuki's sleeve (1982) and Large bold condensed capitals, the second word spaced out with interpuncts, one letter picked out in red, as in A LONG V·A·C·A·T·I·O·N on Nagai's sleeve for Ohtaki (1981)
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from City Pop Illustration, with a counter-accent from Australian Travel Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era) City Pop Illustration
-
#f7f5efground · 36% -
#0f3a8aink · 14% -
#f2c230accent · 18% -
#c8381eaccent · 14% -
#35a9dcaccent · 10% -
#f3a5b6accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f7f5ef;
--ink: #0f3a8a;
--accent-1: #f2c230;
--accent-2: #c8381e;
--accent-3: #35a9dc;
--accent-4: #f3a5b6;
--font-display: "Poiret One", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}Use it with care
Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era): This was settler Australia's image of itself for tourists, settlers and investors. Its designers borrowed Aboriginal imagery for 'a distinctly Australian look': the National Library's curators note motifs drawn from x-ray art, rock paintings and material culture, as in Sellheim's boomerang poster of 1957, and Jillian Barnes shows how Trompf's 'Winter Tours to Central Australia' for Commonwealth Railways 'applied the Santa Fe railway aesthetic', the American railroad's romantic tourist image of Native Americans, to Central Australia, replacing 'Indians' of the pueblos with Arrernte ('Arunta') men, and put modern white travellers at the centre and the Arrernte men small, servile and at the rear, standing for the past. Do not reuse its boomerangs, corroboree figures, x-ray or rock-art motifs, or its picture of Aboriginal people, as period decoration: Aboriginal designs belong to particular peoples and clans, so work with First Nations artists under Creative Australia's Protocols for using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts. Treat its colonial subjects, Cook's landing at Botany Bay and 'the tallest trees in the British Empire', as celebrations of British settlement on unceded Aboriginal land, not neutral heritage. Many posters are still in copyright, credited by the National Library to the Percy Trompf Artistic Trust, the Northfield family and the Sellheim and Annand families: license them or paint your own place and light.
City Pop Illustration: The look rests on two working artists, Hiroshi Nagai and Eizin Suzuki, who still paint, sell originals and prints and take commissions. For their pictures, commission or license them. Otherwise invent your own place, light and palette in the shared idiom: never trace or recompose their compositions (A Long Vacation's pool, For You's radio shop, Pacific Breeze's villas), never ask an image model for their style by name, and never present a generated image as their work or as a period sleeve.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Australian Travel Poster
- WPA Silkscreen Posters Contrasts · The Federal Art Project also made travel and national-park posters in the 1930s, but in flat, layered screenprint for public programmes; set them side by side to choose between commercial painted lithography and a few opaque public-service inks.
- Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Contrasts · Its nearest neighbour by genome: both print idealising painted realism in deep space for a romantic, sunlit ideal. The calendar puts a small sponsor's name under an academic oil-painting melodrama; the ANTA poster sells a place by name, in big drawn capitals on a solid band, with a bather or rider as the traveller's stand-in. Use the calendar for legend and glamour, this for a destination.
- Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Pairs well · A state-promoted lithographic school of the same years that also advertised tourism under bold drawn lettering. Görey's figures, from his Munich training in Hohlwein's orbit, stand in crisp patches of light on a light ground where ANTA opens a painted vista; borrow its framed emblem and giant letters for a tighter, flatter ANTA sheet.
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · The same lithographed naturalism, deep space, giant foreground figures and lettered slogans for official clients. Socialist realism makes the figure a heroic worker on a rising diagonal under red; ANTA makes it a bather, rider or tourist at leisure in a landscape of light. Choose by whether the poster calls people to work or to a holiday.
- Greek Tourism Modernism (EOT) Contrasts · Both are national tourism posters selling sun to foreign visitors under the country's name, but ANTA painted a deep, peopled vista while EOT set one cut-out sign on flat colour; compare them to choose between the painted destination and the modernist emblem.
- Art Deco Contrasts · Its parent: Trompf's colour lithography is described as 'bold, simplified realism in an Art Deco style', and the National Gallery of Victoria's resource for its Art Deco exhibition says Sellheim 'has incorporated a distinctive Art Deco typeface into his designs'. It keeps Deco's capitals, airbrush and flat colour but swaps Cassandre's machine geometry, chevrons and luxury for sunlit beaches, bush and wildlife; use Deco when the subject is speed and glamour, this when it is a place and its light.
- London Transport Design Pairs well · The National Gallery of Victoria traces ANTA's poster programme to the London Underground and LNER posters, and ANTA also commissioned Tom Purvis, the LNER's poster artist from 1923 to 1943 and by the late 1930s 'the biggest name in British commercial design', to make its 1938 150th-anniversary posters for London billboards (NLA Z100). Borrow Pick's fixed emblem and consistent lettering band to hold a series of varied painted views together.
- Australian Poster Collective Screenprints 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 City Pop Illustration
- Googie & Atomic Age Pairs well · Googie's motels, diners and boomerang roadside signs are the American architecture these painters idealised; borrow its signage and script for the fascias in a city pop street scene.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Suzuki fills his streets with painted shop names; real sign-writers' letterforms make the fascias in a city pop scene read as made rather than typeset.
- Vaporwave Contrasts · Nagai's resorts fed vaporwave, which collages palms and pools with busts, dialog boxes and glitches as ironic consumer debris; choose city pop when the place should be painted sincerely, whole and uncluttered.
- Synthwave / Outrun Contrasts · Both put palms and cars on a 1980s horizon, but synthwave lights them in neon at night over a grid and chrome; switch to city pop for clear daylight, a deep blue sky and flat, cool colour.
- Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic Contrasts · Both are sincere, painted and calm, and both found a worldwide audience on YouTube, lofi in its 24/7 streams and city pop in its 2010s revival; lofi puts one absorbed anime figure in a lamp-lit room at dusk with soft edges, city pop opens onto an empty sunlit place under a deep blue sky in hard-edged colour. Choose city pop when the brief is a place, not a person.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Nagai drew on pop art and on David Hockney, a British pop artist who painted Los Angeles swimming pools in acrylic, rather than on Warhol's quotation: pop art appropriates mass-media images with halftone and irony, city pop paints an invented place sincerely in flat, untextured colour; choose city pop when the picture should invite rather than comment.
- Flat Design Pairs well · City pop's hard-edged, untextured fields translate directly into vector illustration; use them for web heroes and app splash screens that need a calm sense of place rather than icons, keeping city pop's deep perspective, which flat design avoids.
- Showa and Heisei Retro Revival (Japanese Packaging and Kissaten Graphics) Pairs well · Shares 1980s nostalgia; pair its painted, airy scenes with retro tableware graphics for a fuller period feel.