Style combination · Contrasts
Australian Travel Poster × WPA Silkscreen Posters
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.
Mix them and make something Australian Travel Poster WPA Silkscreen Posters
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) WPA Silkscreen Posters
- Type from Australian Travel Poster
- Colour from WPA Silkscreen Posters
- Form from Australian Travel Poster
- Composition from WPA Silkscreen Posters
- 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
Kin
Poiret One, standing in for Hand-drawn Art Deco sans capitals
Text · WPA Silkscreen Posters
Posters made by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration to promote health campaigns, education, theatre, travel and the national parks during the Depression. Unemployed artists adapted commercial silkscreen to print runs by hand, which gave the work its flat, opaque layered colour, simplified stylised forms and clear geometric lettering in a public-service voice.
Jost; WPA Silkscreen Posters used Hand-cut stencil lettering in geometric sans-serif capitals and Futura (Paul Renner, 1927) and similar geometric sans-serifs
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from WPA Silkscreen Posters, 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) WPA Silkscreen Posters
-
#efe6cfground · 36% -
#222222ink · 14% -
#c8622daccent · 18% -
#d9a441accent · 14% -
#3d5a7aaccent · 10% -
#6f7a45accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe6cf;
--ink: #222222;
--accent-1: #c8622d;
--accent-2: #d9a441;
--accent-3: #3d5a7a;
--accent-4: #6f7a45;
--font-display: "Poiret One", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Jost", 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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Australian Travel Poster
- 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.
- 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 WPA Silkscreen Posters
- Flat Design Pairs well · Its flat layered shapes translate directly to vector; use the national-park look for warm, civic flat illustration.
- Psychedelic Poster Contrasts · Calm, legible public information versus deliberate optical overload; choose WPA clarity when a message must reach everyone.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Both layer a few opaque inks; borrow WPA's stylised landscapes and plain messages for contemporary riso posters.
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Pairs well · Both mobilised a 1930s public with state-funded posters; add socialist realism's heroic low-angle figures to WPA's flat silkscreen colour when a civic campaign needs more urgency.
- Australian Poster Collective Screenprints Pairs well · An earlier public-service silkscreen tradition; combine its calm stencil figures with the collectives' fluoro colour and puns.
- Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Pairs well · Both are 1930s state-backed poster programmes for public institutions and tourism; combine WPA silkscreen flatness with Görey's modelled figures for civic campaigns.
- Estado Novo Folk Modernism (SPN) Pairs well · Both turned 1930s state poster programmes toward the rural and the regional; borrow WPA's flat layered landscapes and add SPN heraldry for regional tourism or heritage pieces.
- Harlem Renaissance Graphic Art Pairs well · Douglas's 1934 murals were New Deal commissions; pair his silhouettes with WPA screenprint layouts for civic, narrative posters.