Style combination · Contrasts
West African Barbershop × Lotería Card Imagery
Both lay out named, numbered pictures in rows and columns, but a barbershop sign is one hand-painted menu of heads that differ only in their hairstyle, under the shop's boast, while a lotería tabla is a printed board of unrelated emblems, one of a set of boards that each hold a different selection from the same deck.
Mix them and make something West African Barbershop Lotería Card Imagery
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.
West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)
- Type from Lotería Card Imagery
- Colour from West African Barbershop
- Form from Lotería Card Imagery
- Composition from West African Barbershop
- Surface from West African Barbershop
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Lotería Card Imagery
Square
Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-drawn capitals on homemade tablas and artists' redrawn decks
Text · West African Barbershop
Hand-painted boards advertising barbershops and braiding salons across West and Central Africa, made by self-taught, often anonymous sign painters since the mid-20th century. Unlike lettering-led shop fascias they work as a picture menu: rows of naive, frontal heads, each modelling one named hairstyle, are laid out like a specimen chart under the shop name and boasts such as 'Extra O' (extraordinary).
Oswald; West African Barbershop used Outlined, drop-shadowed block capitals by sign painters and Brush-painted style names and numbers as captions
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from West African Barbershop, with a counter-accent from Lotería Card Imagery. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería)
-
#f4efe6ground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#f2c230accent · 18% -
#c62f2aaccent · 14% -
#86c8e6accent · 10% -
#2f7fc1accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4efe6;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #f2c230;
--accent-2: #c62f2a;
--accent-3: #86c8e6;
--accent-4: #2f7fc1;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Oswald", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería): Lotería is a living family game, played across Mexico and much of the United States and in parts of Central America, and a marker of Mexican and Mexican-American identity, so do not use it as generic 'Mexican' party decoration for products with no tie to those communities, and commission and credit Mexican, Central American and Chicanx artists when you redraw it. The standard deck's nine human figures are all stereotypes of Indigenous people, upper-class white people and Afro-Latinos (TIME, citing Gloria Arjona), most plainly El Negrito (No. 26) and El Apache (No. 38), stock figures of a Black man and a Native American, and other decks carry the same kind of figure (the feathered Indio with bow and arrow on Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas): do not reproduce them as period charm; replace them, as new decks freely do. The owners of Don Clemente Gallo (Pasatiempos Gallo) hold the registered trademark of the original images, so draw new emblems rather than tracing them, and write card names in correct Spanish instead of mock-Spanish.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With West African Barbershop
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Treat the hairstyle board as a humane pictogram chart: one consistent figure per cell, labelled, for comparison at a glance.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Use the sign writer's shaded capitals for the shop band and the barbershop grid of painted heads below it, as the boards themselves do.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Both repeat one head in a grid with small variations; pair Warhol's serial portraits with painted, named hairstyles for a warmer, hand-made take on repetition.
- Ghanaian Movie Poster Contrasts · Same painters' media and cities but opposite temperament; set the calm, catalogue-like heads against the lurid, distorted drama of the movie posters.
- Matatu & Nganya Art Pairs well · Another African street commission built on painted heads; pair the barbershop board's frontal, stylised faces with the matatu's airbrushed, foreshortened star portraits for a Nairobi street layout.
- South African Vernacular Design (Ijusi) Pairs well · Hair-salon boards were among Ijusi's sources; pair a painted grid of named hairstyles with a many-typeface layout and found photographs.
- Tingatinga Painting Pairs well · Both are hand-painted enamel on board for a street market; borrow the sign painter's outlined capitals to give Tingatinga figures a title or shop name.
With Lotería Card Imagery
- Kanga (Swahili Message Cloth) Contrasts · Both centre one motif in a frame above a line of capitals, but a kanga is a cloth whose printed Swahili saying is its message, while a lotería card prints only the emblem's name and leaves the verse to the caller's voice.
- Chicano Screenprint Poster Pairs well · Chicano artists from Carmen Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas onward redraw the lotería card as a sign of Mexican-American home life; frame a screenprinted slogan or portrait as a numbered, named card to borrow that recognition.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Contrasts · Both set picture signs on a grid, but Isotype's pictograms are reduced, uniform and repeated to count quantities, while every lotería emblem is a different, fully drawn picture with its own name, matched by chance and read aloud.
- Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen Contrasts · Both are cheap coloured popular prints of stock figures in ruled frames under capital captions, but an Épinal sheet tells a story or musters a row of soldiers across many cases, while a lotería card holds one emblem and the tabla's cells have no order: the caller draws them by chance.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Posada himself printed a Juego de lotería; pair the lotería card's single framed emblem and name with his black relief calaveras and shouting broadside type for a Mexican popular-print voice that is both orderly and satirical.
- Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards Contrasts · Lotería also gives each card one figure with its name at the foot, but in letterspaced sans capitals and soft offset colour; borrow the tarot's carved roman title band, ruled frame and stencil drift to make a lotería-type card set look older and graver.
- Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Contrasts · Both are popular Mexican colour prints for everyday use, but the lotería sets one flat, outlined emblem figure per numbered card in a ruled frame, named in capitals at the foot, for a game, while the chromo paints one modelled scene in deep landscape to hang for a year.