Style combination · Contrasts
Australian Travel Poster × Greek Tourism Modernism
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.
Mix them and make something Australian Travel Poster Greek Tourism Modernism
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) Greek Tourism Modernism (EOT)
- Type from Australian Travel Poster
- Colour from Greek Tourism Modernism
- Form from Australian Travel Poster
- Composition from Greek Tourism Modernism
- 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
Quiet
Poiret One, standing in for Hand-drawn Art Deco sans capitals
Text · Greek Tourism Modernism
The modernist image of Greece made for the National Tourism Organisation (EOT) by Michalis Katzourakis, its art adviser in 1960-1967, and by Frederick Carabott, who advised it until 1967; in 1962 the two also founded the K&K Athens Advertising Centre. A poster sets one Hellenic sign (a photographed relief, vase or statue, a Byzantine dome) on flat saturated colour or, full-bleed, a mosaic or a woven ship, under the country's name, often one lowercase word in bold sans: grèce, greece. After 1967 photography gradually took over, but other designers kept the manner going at EOT under the junta.
Inter; Greek Tourism Modernism used Bold sans-serif in lowercase, geometric or grotesque, for the one-word country name (grèce, greece, griechenland), most often on the EOT posters of 1960-1963, and still on 'athens festival' in 1974 and Widely spaced roman serif capitals
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Greek Tourism Modernism, 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) Greek Tourism Modernism (EOT)
-
#141414ground · 36% -
#f3efe6ink · 14% -
#f2c230accent · 18% -
#c8381eaccent · 14% -
#e8812aaccent · 10% -
#1f3f9caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #141414;
--ink: #f3efe6;
--accent-1: #f2c230;
--accent-2: #c8381e;
--accent-3: #e8812a;
--accent-4: #1f3f9c;
--font-display: "Poiret One", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Inter", sans-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.
Greek Tourism Modernism (EOT): Many of these posters picture Byzantine churches and monasteries, such as Mystras and island chapels, that remain active Orthodox sacred places, and borrow woven and mosaic motifs from living regional crafts: use them with that weight, not as interchangeable 'Greek' decoration. The style is also a state nation-branding image made for foreign visitors, and other designers went on making EOT posters in this manner, beside colour photography, under the 1967-1974 military dictatorship, so do not present its sunlit antiquity as a neutral picture of Greece. Commercial reuse of photographs of Greek monuments and museum antiquities also needs permission from, and a fee to, the Greek state (Law 4858/2021, article 46), so clear any statue, relief or site photograph before using it in new work.
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.
- City Pop Illustration Pairs well · 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.
- 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.
- 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 Greek Tourism Modernism
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Its parent by look rather than by training (neither designer studied in Switzerland): it keeps the Swiss lowercase grotesque, flat spot colour and treated photograph, but drops the grid for one symbolic picture, often on a symmetrical axis; add a Swiss column grid when the text must say more than a country's name.
- Art Deco Contrasts · Katzourakis studied poster design under Paul Colin in Paris; set a Deco travel poster's heroic, airbrushed destination beside this flat, cut-out sign to show how the tourist poster was stripped down after the war.
- Estado Novo Folk Modernism (SPN) Contrasts · Both are southern European state images aimed partly at foreign visitors, but the SPN staged a static rural, Catholic idyll in lithographed figures, while EOT turned antiquity and the islands into cut-out signs on colour; compare them to choose between folk narrative and modernist emblem.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Pairs well · Both set one national emblem on a flat field of colour; borrow Kamekura's geometric sun disc and charged emptiness to tighten a Greek heritage motif into a modern mark.
- Iranian Modernist Graphic Design Contrasts · Both are 1960s national modernisms that turned heritage into modern posters: Tehran built it from calligraphic letterforms, EOT from photographed antiquities under a single word of sans; compare them to choose between letter-led and object-led heritage modernism.