Style combination · Contrasts
Brazilian Concrete Design × Taller de Gráfica Popular
Mexico's figurative, militant linocuts are Latin America's other modernism; contrast them to choose between abstraction and narrative.
Mix them and make something Brazilian Concrete Design Taller de Gráfica Popular
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 Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Type from Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Colour from Brazilian Concrete Design
- Form from Brazilian Concrete Design
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Taller de Gráfica Popular avoids non-representational: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Composition from Brazilian Concrete Design
- Surface from Taller de Gráfica Popular
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Taller de Gráfica Popular
Form
Inter Tight, standing in for Letterpress grotesque and slab-serif captions
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 Taller de Gráfica Popular. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Brazilian Concrete Design Taller de Gráfica Popular
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#f4f2ecground · 36% -
#121212ink · 14% -
#f3c316accent · 18% -
#c0392baccent · 14% -
#d9c39aaccent · 10% -
#1f4e9eaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4f2ec;
--ink: #121212;
--accent-1: #f3c316;
--accent-2: #c0392b;
--accent-3: #d9c39a;
--accent-4: #1f4e9e;
--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.
- 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.
- 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 Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Both favour cheap, direct, monochrome reproduction; a linocut figure with photocopied type gives protest graphics hand-made urgency.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Pairs well · Combine TGP's black linocut figures with Cuban flat colour for politically engaged posters with a hand-made Latin American lineage.
- Art Deco Contrasts · Glossy Deco glamour versus gouged, populist black and white: use the contrast to separate luxury from solidarity.
- Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Pairs well · China's 1930s–40s woodcut movement ran in parallel with the TGP; combine the two black-line traditions for prints about labour and resistance across continents.
- Minjung Woodcut Graphics (Korean People's Art) Contrasts · Nearest in the atlas, and the closest Mexican print lineage to the Mexican Muralism that MMCA names as a source: both cut black-line people's prints for movements, but TGP sets condensed Latin capitals and lithographs, while Minjung prints carry short Hangul slogans and dancing, ritual-derived figures, and are scaled up to geolgae banners.
- Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism Pairs well · Rojo set Leopoldo Méndez's engravings in the Revista de la Universidad de México (no. 3, 1971); a black linocut framed by fine rules on a white page joins Mexico City's militant print culture to its editorial modernism.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · The TGP took Posada as its ancestor; combine his calavera satire with linocut political posters for socially engaged print.
- Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics Pairs well · Leopoldo Méndez carried the Stridentist woodcut into the Taller de Gráfica Popular in 1937; give a TGP print a radio mast or a skyline on a steep diagonal and one bright ink to bring back the machine-age optimism.