Style combination · Pairs well
Chicano Screenprint Poster × Cuban Revolutionary Poster
Both are solidarity screenprints; borrow OSPAAAL's single bold image and add Chicano bilingual wordplay and barrio iconography.
Mix them and make something Chicano Screenprint Poster Cuban Revolutionary Poster
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.
Chicano Screenprint Poster Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC)
- Type from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Colour from Chicano Screenprint Poster
- Form from Chicano Screenprint Poster
- Composition from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Surface from Chicano Screenprint Poster
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Cuban Revolutionary Poster
Now!
Archivo Black; Cuban Revolutionary Poster used Hand-cut silkscreen display lettering and Neo-grotesque sans captions repeated in Spanish, English, French and Arabic
Text · Chicano Screenprint Poster
The screenprinted poster of the Chicano Movement and its heirs, made from the mid-1960s in community workshops across California and the Southwest for farmworker strikes and boycotts, teatro, dances, anti-war marches and immigrant rights. Flat opaque inks, posterised portraits and bilingual slogans recast Mexican icons (the UFW eagle, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Posada's calaveras, Mexica glyphs) for the US barrio, often by parodying American packaging.
Archivo; Chicano Screenprint Poster used Hand-cut screen-stencil lettering and Bold sans and hand-drawn capitals for bilingual strike and boycott slogans
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Chicano Screenprint Poster, with a counter-accent from Cuban Revolutionary Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Chicano Screenprint Poster Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC)
-
#f2eadbground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#f4a11caccent · 18% -
#d7262eaccent · 14% -
#7a2d8caccent · 10% -
#1f6f4aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2eadb;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #f4a11c;
--accent-2: #d7262e;
--accent-3: #7a2d8c;
--accent-4: #1f6f4a;
--font-display: "Archivo Black", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Chicano Screenprint Poster: The Virgin of Guadalupe is a devotional image for many Mexicans and Chicanos, and Chicana feminist reworkings of her have met protest. Mexica glyphs and calendar imagery carry Indigenous meaning, and the UFW black eagle is the union's own emblem, not a free motif. Use them with community context, credit the movement, and commission Chicanx printmakers rather than lifting the look for marketing.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Chicano Screenprint Poster
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Chicano parody works by quoting the clean corporate mark and corrupting it; study the brand's grammar before you subvert it.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Posada's calaveras are a shared ancestor; mix his relief skeletons with flat screen colour for Día de Muertos work with a political edge.
- Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting Pairs well · Chicano screenprinters reclaimed Mexica glyphs and calendar imagery for the movement; when contour-and-flat-colour glyphs meet a modern poster, follow their example of community context and credit. Mexica (Aztec) glyphs are a different source from these Mixtec and Borgia Group books: credit a codex source as such rather than folding it into 'Aztec'.
- AfriCOBRA Pairs well · Movement screenprints of the same years, made in and for their own communities: Chicano posters set one emblematic figure on flat colour, often parodying American packaging; AfriCOBRA packs the figure into a lettered, many-coloured field and stays sincere. Pair them, as both pair with the Panthers, for coalition work.
- Fania and Nuyorican Salsa LP Sleeves Pairs well · Another US Latino graphic voice; borrow its community iconography.
- Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP) Pairs well · Two Spanish-language screenprint traditions of the Americas; add Chicano bilingual slogans and posterised portraits to Puerto Rican letrismo for community event posters.
- Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción Graphics Pairs well · Both tie community walls to cheap posters for a movement; combine a black-contoured Ramona Parra frieze with Chicano bilingual screenprints for coalition street graphics.
- Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) Pairs well · Chicano artists from Carmen Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas onward redraw the lotería card as a sign of Mexican-American home life; frame a screenprinted slogan or portrait as a numbered, named card to borrow that recognition.
With Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · Cuba largely avoided Soviet painted realism; set a flat silhouette against a heroic painting to show abstraction carrying politics.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Militant, colourful single-image posters versus neutral corporate systems; use the Cuban mode where a cause needs urgency.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Pair Pop's flat, brand-like imagery with Cuban single-idea silhouettes for bold campaign posters.
- Gráfica del 68 (Mexican Student Movement Graphics) Contrasts · OSPAAAL and ICAIC posters were planned, many-coloured and made to last, while the 68 brigades printed one ink for the next march; choose Cuba for a solidarity campaign, 68 for an emergency.
- Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics Contrasts · ICAIC's film posters also read a film through one silhouette or pun, but in saturated, clashing screenprint colour for a revolutionary public; Bass keeps to one or two flat colours and black, and the symbol's real home is the moving title.
- Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters) Pairs well · Both are state poster programmes that took up pop and op colour; give an OSPAAAL-style single emblem Ruiz Durand's comic contour and enlarged dot ground for a campaign that must read from across a village square.
- Puerto Rican Silkscreen Poster (DIVEDCO & ICP) Pairs well · Both are state-backed Caribbean silkscreen cultures for cinema and the arts, and Puerto Rico's began more than a decade before ICAIC's workshop; combine ICAIC's single conceptual image with Homar's hand-drawn Spanish lettering built into it.
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Contrasts · Same decade, opposite means: ICAIC's silkscreened film posters and OSPAAAL's mostly offset solidarity posters were polished, many-coloured and made to last, while the Atelier's one anonymous ink was pulled overnight for the next morning's wall; decide which of the two the brief needs.