Style combination · Pairs well
Gothic Blackletter × Simplicissimus Satirical Style
Set the title and the spoken caption in Fraktur, as the magazine did on almost every page, to anchor a caricature in German print culture around 1900.
Mix them and make something Gothic Blackletter Simplicissimus Satirical Style
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.
Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
- Type from Gothic Blackletter
- Colour from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Form from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Composition from Gothic Blackletter
- Surface from Gothic Blackletter
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Gothic Blackletter
No!
UnifrakturMaguntia, standing in for Gutenberg's 42-line Bible textura (Mainz, c. 1454–55)
Text · Simplicissimus Satirical Style
The house style of the Munich satirical weekly Simplicissimus, set by Th. Th. Heine, Eduard Thöny, Bruno Paul, Rudolf Wilke and Olaf Gulbransson. Each page is one drawing that is the joke: an officer, priest, junker, profiteer or minister in a sure contour, black silhouettes and two or three flat tints inside a ruled frame, with a Fraktur title above and a punchline, usually spoken, below. It turned the Jugendstil line from ornament to caricature, and the 1898 Palestine issue brought confiscation and prison sentences for Heine and Wedekind.
EB Garamond; Simplicissimus Satirical Style used The hand-drawn SIMPLICISSIMUS masthead and Set Fraktur for the title centred above each drawing and for the parenthetical artist credit
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Simplicissimus Satirical Style, with a counter-accent from Gothic Blackletter. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
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#f0e6ccground · 36% -
#1b1a18ink · 14% -
#c4382caccent · 18% -
#d6a444accent · 14% -
#c85d80accent · 10% -
#93a1bdaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f0e6cc;
--ink: #1b1a18;
--accent-1: #c4382c;
--accent-2: #d6a444;
--accent-3: #c85d80;
--accent-4: #93a1bd;
--font-display: "UnifrakturMaguntia", serif;
--font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}Use it with care
Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition: Blackletter carries political weight in German-speaking countries: the Nazi regime pushed Fraktur as the German script in its first years before banning it in January 1941 as supposed 'Schwabacher Jewish letters', and neo-Nazis still use broken scripts. In the United States, too, certain blackletter faces are associated with hate groups, on tattoos and clothing. Check how a blackletter wordmark will read, especially for anything German, national or political. Cholo placas are territorial inscriptions of Los Angeles Latino street writing with their own codes: do not copy a real neighbourhood's placa or roll call, and commission or credit Chicano letterers (such as Chaz Bojórquez) rather than borrowing their menace as decoration.
Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich): Its caricature works by types, and that cuts both ways. Some pages drew colonised Africans as caricatures even when the target was the colonisers (Heine's Kolonialmächte, 1904). From August 1914 the magazine backed the war and turned its satire on the enemy nations, including racist pictures of non-European and Russian troops, and in the Weimar years it still ran nationalist jokes against the Allied victors and France. After 1933 it followed the Nazi line, including antisemitic satire, while Heine, hated by the Nazis not least for his Jewish origin, was forced out and fled. Several of its canonical draughtsmen served the regime: Hitler made Thöny an honorary professor in 1938 and put him on the Gottbegnadeten list in 1944; Schilling, a fierce critic of the Nazis before 1933, became their propagandist; and in the last issue of September 1944 Gulbransson, Schilling and Thöny supplied propaganda drawings. Take the method of 1896–1914 and 1919–1933 (one framed drawing, flat tints, a spoken punchline) and aim it at power. Exaggerate the uniform, bearing and costume of the powerful, not ethnicity, religion, disability or the bodies of the powerless. The profiteer, the usurer and the octopus gripping its victims (Heine's Der Wucher, 1923) were also stock antisemitic codes in these years, so mark a profiteer by class (top hat, monocle, fur collar), never by ethnic features. Gulbransson (d. 1958), George Grosz (d. 1959) and Bruno Paul (d. 1968) are still in copyright in the EU, until the end of 2028, 2029 and 2038; Heine's work has been public domain there since 2019. Draw your own, do not present a new design as a Simplicissimus page, and do not use the bulldog as a mark.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Gothic Blackletter
- Arts & Crafts Movement Pairs well · Morris's Kelmscott Press revived gothic type (Troy and Chaucer) inside dense woodcut borders; join the broken letter to foliate frames and handmade paper for a medieval, hand-made book.
- Die Neue Typographie Contrasts · Its flush-left sans-serif page on an asymmetric axis is everything the centred, justified blackletter block is not; set the two side by side to stage the argument between tradition and modernity.
- Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Pairs well · Old English letters run through Los Angeles cholo writing into later street lettering; give a hand-drawn textura wordmark aerosol fills, outlines and drop shadows for street weight.
- Renaissance Book Typography Contrasts · Its historical rival: the light, round, open humanist roman page against the dark, broken, woven gothic one. Drop one blackletter title or initial into an Aldine-style page for a deliberate clash of eras.
- Acid Graphics / New Ugly Pairs well · Its club-poster revival: acid graphics mixes blackletter with liquid chrome, ultra-wide grotesques and pixel faces. Render one broken-letter wordmark in chrome on black and leave the parchment, rubrics and justified page behind.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Pairs well · English proclamations and notices kept black letter for gravity; set one blackletter line among slab and Tuscan wood type to lend a playbill or notice an official, old-world voice.
- Gothic Book of Hours (Illuminated Devotional Book) Pairs well · Compare the shared Gothic text block, then distinguish the book-of-hours page by its coordinated miniatures, graded initials and marginal programme; a blackletter wordmark alone does not reproduce this system.
- Pixação (São Paulo Tag Reto) Pairs well · Tag reto descends from gothic and runic forms by way of metal logos; set a textura line above a row of straight, pointed tag-reto letters, both in black, to show the lineage from the book page to the façade.
With Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Contrasts · Both distort the figure in protest, but Expressionist prints gouge it from the woodblock with angular, raw marks; Simplicissimus keeps a clean brush contour and flat tints, and adds a punchline.
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · The parent: Heine took over the Jugendstil idiom, but where Art Nouveau spends the whiplash line on flowers and idealised women, Simplicissimus spends it on a grotesque type and a caption. Choose it when the curve should mock rather than adorn.
- Japonisme Pairs well · Heine drew on Japanese woodcuts: add japonisme's cropped asymmetry and silhouetted figures against blank grounds to give a caricature more air and bite.
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat Pairs well · The NDB places Heine's posters at the start of the new poster style: borrow the Sachplakat's single object and bold block lettering for a satirical poster that keeps Simplicissimus's flat silhouette and red-on-black.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · A later weekly humour magazine of the same satirical stance: Gırgır, Penguen and Uykusuz pack covers with speech balloons, comic strips and colour; Simplicissimus gives one framed drawing and one caption.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Contrasts · A contemporary in cheap satirical print around 1900 (Simplicissimus cost 10 pfennig an issue), but Posada's broadsheets pair a heavy relief cut with white-line hatching and shouting mixed display type above columns of verse, black on coloured paper; Simplicissimus gives one clean-contoured drawing with flat tints and a Fraktur caption.
- Dada Contrasts · George Grosz drew for Simplicissimus but in Berlin Dada turned satire into photomontage and typographic chaos; choose Simplicissimus for a drawn, legible joke, Dada for a cut-up assault.
- Moomin Graphics (Tove Jansson's Pen-Drawn World and its Licensed Afterlife) Contrasts · Jansson drew political satire for the Finland-Swedish magazine Garm in the broad European satirical-magazine tradition that Simplicissimus led; Moomin keeps a sure pen line but drops the upward-aimed attack and the grotesque body for round, gentle figures.