Style combination · Pairs well
Chilean Unidad Popular × Cuban Revolutionary Poster
Vicente Larrea named Cuban posters among his influences; take OSPAAAL's single emblematic image and give it the Chilean black contour and hand-drawn letters.
Mix them and make something Chilean Unidad Popular 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.
Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción Graphics Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC)
- Type from Chilean Unidad Popular
- Colour from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Form from Chilean Unidad Popular
- Composition from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Surface from Chilean Unidad Popular
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Chilean Unidad Popular
Rise
Londrina Solid; Chilean Unidad Popular used Hand-drawn closed-form lettering of the Larrea office and Brigada Ramona Parra painted slogan letters
Text · Cuban Revolutionary Poster
The poster culture of revolutionary Cuba, produced for the film institute ICAIC and the solidarity organisation OSPAAAL. With no commercial advertising and scarce materials, designers made bold silkscreen and offset posters that combined Pop and psychedelic colour, op-art pattern, flat silhouettes and single conceptual images, for cinema and for internationalist causes from Vietnam to Africa.
Archivo; Cuban Revolutionary Poster used Hand-cut silkscreen display lettering and Neo-grotesque sans captions repeated in Spanish, English, French and Arabic
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Cuban Revolutionary Poster, with a counter-accent from Chilean Unidad Popular. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción Graphics Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC)
-
#f2ede0ground · 36% -
#1c1c1cink · 14% -
#f5b81caccent · 18% -
#e3342baccent · 14% -
#d6337aaccent · 10% -
#2d8a57accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2ede0;
--ink: #1c1c1c;
--accent-1: #f5b81c;
--accent-2: #e3342b;
--accent-3: #d6337a;
--accent-4: #2d8a57;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción Graphics: The Brigada Ramona Parra still paints and remains closely tied to Chile's Communist Youth and Communist Party, and the Larrea office's posters and sleeves are living designers' work: Vicente Larrea publicly called the 2022 Rechazo campaign's reuse of 'La felicidad de Chile comienza por los niños' a plagiarism. Víctor Jara was killed after the 1973 coup and brigade members were persecuted. Credit the makers and ask the brigade or the office before quoting their work, rather than stripping it into generic retro-revolutionary styling.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Chilean Unidad Popular
- Chicano Screenprint Poster 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.
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · Against academic painted realism, the brigades reduced figures to flat colour and black line any team could repeat; set the two side by side to show party art without the easel.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Hand-drawn letters and irregular contours against the neutral grotesque and grid; use the Chilean mode where a cause needs warmth rather than neutrality.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Both are brush-painted street lettering with reinforced outlines; borrow the sign writer's clean letter for a slogan wall that reads at walking pace.
- Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets) Pairs well · Set a flat-colour Unidad Popular poster beside a black woodcut frieze and ruled verse columns for a Chilean design that spans popular print and political modernism.
- Chilean Estallido Social Graphics (Revuelta Popular of 2019–20) Contrasts · Víctor Jara's songs and portraits returned to the walls in 2019, but the Unidad Popular's party brigades and Larrea sleeves painted a planned, utopian Chile in flat Pop colours, while the revolt's anonymous photocopies attack power in black and one red; set them side by side to show hope organised against rage improvised.
- Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters) Pairs well · Contemporary Andean-Pacific reform graphics with black-contoured figures and hand-drawn letters; pair a Ramona Parra emblem frieze with a Peruvian halftone campesino for a coalition poster about land and work.
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.