Style combination · Pairs well
Brazilian Concrete Design × International Typographic Style
Bring concrete poetry's spatial word-play into a Swiss grid to make typographic layouts that read as images.
Mix them and make something Brazilian Concrete Design International Typographic 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.
Brazilian Concrete Design International Typographic Style
- Type from International Typographic Style
- Colour from Brazilian Concrete Design
- Form from Brazilian Concrete Design
- Composition from International Typographic Style
- Surface from Brazilian Concrete Design
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Text · Brazilian Concrete Design
A São Paulo and Rio movement in which concrete art, concrete poetry and Brazil's first design offices shared one vocabulary: Max Bill's mathematically generated geometry, serial repetition and sans-serif type. Sparked by Bill's 1951 retrospective at MASP and the first São Paulo Bienal, it passed through Ulm via Alexandre Wollner into Forminform (1957) and ESDI (1963), producing rigorous trademarks, posters and a celebrated newspaper redesign.
Jost; Brazilian Concrete Design used Futura and Akzidenz-Grotesk
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Brazilian Concrete Design, with a counter-accent from International Typographic Style. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Brazilian Concrete Design International Typographic Style
-
#f4f2ecground · 36% -
#121212ink · 14% -
#f3c316accent · 18% -
#e1251baccent · 14% -
#1f4e9caccent · 10% -
#7a7a7aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4f2ec;
--ink: #121212;
--accent-1: #f3c316;
--accent-2: #e1251b;
--accent-3: #1f4e9c;
--accent-4: #7a7a7a;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Jost", sans-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.
- 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.
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Contrasts · 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.
- 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 International Typographic Style
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · Ornamental curves against an orthogonal grid make a strong deliberate tension.
- Brutalist Web Design Pairs well · Strip the grid to raw HTML defaults to get a rawer, contemporary take on Swiss honesty.
- Psychedelic Poster Contrasts · Its exact opposite on legibility; borrow one swirling element to break a too-cold Swiss layout.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Pairs well · Add Japanese restraint and emblematic colour fields to the grid for warmth without losing order.
- American Traditional Tattoo Flash Contrasts · Rational grid and sans-serif against sentimental, hand-lettered emblems: one flash motif on a Swiss layout makes a sharp contrast.
- Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics Contrasts · Put a single tag or throw-up over a strict Swiss grid to stage the clash between institutional order and a street voice.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Set one loud appropriated Pop image inside a strict grid with a neutral grotesque so the irony reads as deliberate rather than chaotic.
- Italian Painted Film Poster (Rome Studios) Contrasts · Grid, restraint and photographic objectivity are the opposite of a crowded painted montage.