Style combination · Contrasts
Belle Époque Lithographic Poster × Die Neue Typographie
Swap the hand-drawn lettering and painted figure for set sans-serif and photography to see exactly what the modernists rejected.
Mix them and make something Belle Époque Lithographic Poster Die Neue Typographie
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.
Belle Époque Lithographic Poster Die Neue Typographie
- Type from Die Neue Typographie
- Colour from Belle Époque Lithographic Poster
- Form from Belle Époque Lithographic Poster
- Composition from Die Neue Typographie
- Surface from Belle Époque Lithographic Poster
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Belle Époque Lithographic Poster
The large colour lithographic street poster that turned Paris into an open-air gallery, from Jules Chéret's first posters of 1866 to Leonetto Cappiello before the First World War. One dominant, animated figure, flat or vaporous colour printed from a few stones, and lettering drawn by the artist directly on the stone sell cabarets, spectacles, drinks and bicycles at a glance.
Bodoni Moda; Belle Époque Lithographic Poster used Artist's lettering drawn directly on the lithographic stone and Chéret's bouncing, irregular display capitals
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Belle Époque Lithographic Poster, with a counter-accent from Die Neue Typographie. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Belle Époque Lithographic Poster Die Neue Typographie
-
#1b1a1aground · 36% -
#f3e7c9ink · 14% -
#f0b62baccent · 18% -
#d32a1faccent · 14% -
#7d7a73accent · 10% -
#2b4f8caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #1b1a1a;
--ink: #f3e7c9;
--accent-1: #f0b62b;
--accent-2: #d32a1f;
--accent-3: #7d7a73;
--accent-4: #2b4f8c;
--font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Belle Époque Lithographic Poster
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Contrasts · Neurath's neutral pictograms are the opposite of this seductive, personal figure; use the contrast to separate information from persuasion.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Both letter by hand at street scale; combine sign-painter lettering with one bold figure for a lively event or shopfront poster.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Push Pin revived this exuberance; pair a Chéret-style dancing figure with bouncy display lettering for nostalgic entertainment graphics.
- Beggarstaffs Poster (Nicholson & Pryde) Contrasts · Lithographic tone and drawn line against flat cut shapes.
- Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints Pairs well · Use the flat silhouette and keyline of ukiyo-e inside a lithographic poster, as Toulouse-Lautrec did, to read at a distance.
- Italian Liberty Poster (Ricordi and the Stile Liberty Affiche) Pairs well · Take the French poster's single-figure punch but add Ricordi's framed, theatrical symmetry and floral borders.
- Cuban Tobacco Lithography (Habilitaciones & Marquillas) Contrasts · Both are colour lithography of the same decades, but the Paris poster puts one figure on a wall at a distance, while the cigar label packs medals, arms and views into a matched set read in the hand; borrow the poster's single figure when a label grows too crowded.
- Egyptian Painted Film Poster Pairs well · Both are colour-lithographed street posters; borrow the Belle Époque's flat colour and single animated figure to calm a crowded star montage.
With Die Neue Typographie
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Two-colour riso printing suits its black-plus-red restraint for low-budget editorial and posters.
- Cranbrook & Deconstructivist Typography Contrasts · Cranbrook dismantled exactly these rules; state one New Typography convention clearly, then break it on purpose.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Extend its asymmetric black-and-red onto a full modular grid for a seamless Swiss-era update.
- Renaissance Book Typography Contrasts · Tschichold himself returned to the centred classical page; set the two side by side to choose between symmetric tradition and asymmetric function.
- Mechano-Faktura & Polish Constructivist Advertising Pairs well · Pair the line-field image with asymmetric sans setting for an advertising layout.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Pairs well · Saville's model: borrow Tschichold's asymmetric placement and small sans-serif capitals, then replace his photographs with one quoted image to get a cool, ordered sleeve.
- Brodovitch Editorial Design (Harper's Bazaar) Contrasts · Asymmetry without rules: improvised and photographic rather than systematic.
- German Book Art Movement (Buchkunstbewegung) Contrasts · From the mid-1920s the Bauhaus and the New Typography took over the avant-garde of the book; centred hand-press pages against asymmetric sans-serif layouts make a clear old-against-new tension.