Style combination · Contrasts
Brazilian Concrete Design × Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
Brazil's concrete designers worked in the same decades with grids and sans-serifs; set a cordel woodcut against concrete typography for a sharp sertão-versus-São Paulo tension.
Mix them and make something Brazilian Concrete Design Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
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.
Brazilian Concrete Design Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
- Type from Brazilian Concrete Design
- Colour from Brazilian Concrete Design
- Form from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
- Composition from Brazilian Concrete Design
- Surface from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
The cover art of Brazil's literatura de cordel, pocket chapbooks of verse whose single picture is a small woodcut cut in soft umburana wood and printed in black above a plain letterpress title. Woodcuts displaced worn zinc clichés of film-star photographs from the 1940s, led by José Bernardo da Silva's Tipografia São Francisco in Juazeiro do Norte. From the 1960s collectors and galleries turned the blocks into standalone prints by masters such as J. Borges.
Libre Caslon Text; Literatura de Cordel Woodcut used Jobbing letterpress types from the print shop's case, for titles and verse and Lettering carved into the woodblock
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Brazilian Concrete Design, with a counter-accent from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Brazilian Concrete Design Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
-
#f4f2ecground · 36% -
#121212ink · 14% -
#f3c316accent · 18% -
#e8c95aaccent · 14% -
#e2361faccent · 10% -
#b33a2eaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4f2ec;
--ink: #121212;
--accent-1: #f3c316;
--accent-2: #e8c95a;
--accent-3: #e2361f;
--accent-4: #b33a2e;
--font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Libre Caslon Text", serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Brazilian Concrete Design
- Op Art Graphics Pairs well · Maluf's repeated rectangles already vibrate; push the serial module towards op moiré for a kinetic poster that stays constructed.
- Taller de Gráfica Popular Contrasts · Mexico's figurative, militant linocuts are Latin America's other modernism; contrast them to choose between abstraction and narrative.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Bring concrete poetry's spatial word-play into a Swiss grid to make typographic layouts that read as images.
- Andean Woven Graphic Systems Pairs well · Both vary a single module serially; apply the Wari rule of rotating and compressing one unit across a field to a systematic poster or identity.
- Tropicália Graphic Design Contrasts · The Brazilian rational design Duarte trained beside and then swallowed: the 1964 Deus e o Diabo poster keeps concrete's lowercase Helvetica and aligned text blocks, then splits them with one cut-out figure in a sun; the 1968 covers drop the grid altogether.
- Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22) Pairs well · Almeida's tumbled LACTA advertisement gained new meaning once concrete poetry arrived in the 1950s. Set a Klaxon-style word image on a concrete grid to keep the play of letters but discipline its spacing.
- Zagreb Modernist Graphics (EXAT 51 to Teatar &TD) Contrasts · The nearest genome: São Paulo and Zagreb both turned constructive geometry and serial units into posters from 1951. Brazilian concrete design prints offset for industry and the press, sets a few geometric elements in tension with a white ground and stays strictly non-figurative; Zagreb screenprints for a gallery and a student theatre, runs one multiplied unit across the sheet, sometimes on metallic paper, against a small band of lowercase grotesque, and with Arsovski breaks the system with photo collage, pop quotation and rebus titles.
- Pixação (São Paulo Tag Reto) Contrasts · São Paulo's two letter cultures met at the Bienal: concrete design grew out of the first Bienal in 1951, and pixadores wrote across the 28th in 2008. A rational sans on a grid against a wall of tag reto stages the city's divide between institutional modernism and the periphery.
With Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print a cordel-style woodcut on a riso in one ink on tinted stock to keep the pocket-chapbook economy for zines and poetry pamphlets.
- Taller de Gráfica Popular Pairs well · The TGP cut relief prints for protest, cordel for storytelling; combine their black-line language when a narrative needs political edge.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Both put a single relief picture on cheap street print; borrow Posada's calavera satire but keep cordel's quiet, single-title cover.
- Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards Contrasts · Both cut stiff figures in wood with no perspective or modelling, but the cordel cover is printed in black only, with solid blacks and gouged white lines, above a plain letterpress title, while the tarot card colours an outline key through stencils and cuts its numeral and title into the same block; choose cordel for a stark one-colour cover, tarot for a coloured emblem in a numbered set.
- Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets) Pairs well · Brazil's cordel puts one woodcut on a folded booklet cover; combine it with the Chilean single sheet for a series of verse prints that share one set of cuts.
- Tropicália Graphic Design Pairs well · The cangaceiro hero of the north-eastern chapbook stands behind Duarte's Corisco; a cordel woodcut figure in a Tropicalist field of saturated colour keeps the popular and the Pop in one frame.
- Lubok Popular Print Pairs well · Brazilian cordel is another chapbook woodcut tradition; set rhymed verse and a single crude block together, as both do, for narrative print with a vernacular voice.
- Onitsha Market Pamphlets Pairs well · A sister market-pamphlet tradition from north-east Brazil; combine cordel's woodcut covers with Onitsha's found photographs for a cheap-print series identity.