Style combination · Contrasts

Australian Travel Poster × Mexican Calendar Chromo

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.

From the research on Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era)

Mix them and make something Australian Travel Poster Mexican Calendar Chromo

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Australian Travel Poster, their arrangement from Mexican Calendar Chromo, the finish from Mexican Calendar Chromo. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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) Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Type from Australian Travel Poster: All caps
Hand-lettering
Colour from Australian Travel Poster: Full polychrome
Flat fields
Form from Australian Travel Poster: Naturalistic depiction
Stylised figuration
Composition from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Single focal point
Illusion of depth
Surface from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Painterly brushwork

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Australian Travel Poster

Bloom

Poiret One, standing in for Hand-drawn Art Deco sans capitals

Text · Mexican Calendar Chromo

Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops.

Archivo; Mexican Calendar Chromo used The sponsor's name and address overprinted in the band left blank below the picture and Brand logotypes painted into the picture or carried on the product

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Australian Travel Poster, with a counter-accent from Mexican Calendar Chromo. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Australian Travel Poster (ANTA Era) Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

#1f1d2b ground · 36%
#f3e6c2 ink · 14%
#c8381e accent · 18%
#e2b33c accent · 14%
#4a8fb8 accent · 10%
#45633d accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #1f1d2b;
  --ink: #f3e6c2;
  --accent-1: #c8381e;
  --accent-2: #e2b33c;
  --accent-3: #4a8fb8;
  --accent-4: #45633d;
  --font-display: "Poiret One", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", 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.

Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos): The Aztec scenes are a nationalist fantasy of the pre-Hispanic past painted by academically trained artists, several of them born or raised in Spain, not Indigenous art: do not present them as Nahua or Mexica tradition or copy their feathered costumes as if they were ethnography. The saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe are devotional images that many owners pray before, so do not parody them, and the pin-ups were painted, as a UNAM study of the Galas archive puts it, to satisfy male longing and promote the sponsors' brands, carrying old and new stereotypes of women. The paintings are still in copyright (Helguera died in 1971) and Grupo Carso holds the rights to the Galas archive, while Alta reported in 2023 that Calendarios Landin owns the rights to Helguera, so paint new pictures in the manner rather than retouching old chromos.