Style combination · Pairs well

Literatura de Cordel Woodcut × Lira Popular

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.

From the research on Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets)

Mix them and make something Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Lira Popular

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut, their arrangement from Lira Popular, the finish from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets)

Type from Lira Popular: Eclectic mixing
Condensed display

Literatura de Cordel Woodcut avoids eclectic mixing: this is where the two pull against each other.
Colour from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut: Monochrome
Flat fields
Form from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Lira Popular: Column grid
Layered information
Surface from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut: Carved line
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Lira Popular

Together

Grenze Gotisch, standing in for Nineteenth-century condensed and extended wood and metal display types, stacked and centred for the headlines ('VIVA EL 18!', 'Gran incendio en Guayaquil')

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

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut, with a counter-accent from Lira Popular. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets)

#ece4cf ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#e8c95a accent · 18%
#7a7064 accent · 14%
#b33a2e accent · 10%
#3b342c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ece4cf;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #e8c95a;
  --accent-2: #7a7064;
  --accent-3: #b33a2e;
  --accent-4: #3b342c;
  --font-display: "Grenze Gotisch", serif;
  --font-text: "Libre Caslon Text", serif;
}

Use it with care

Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets): The sheets show the real executions, murders and disasters of named people, and some verse 'a lo divino' is devotional; do not recycle a scaffold or a mutilated body as period gore for effect. Prodigy and scandal sheets ("El niño con dos cabezas", "La niña vestida de hombre i que se casó con otra niña") made a spectacle of real, often poor or gender-nonconforming people; quote them as history, not as freak-show novelty. The images are mostly anonymous, so do not credit a cut to the poet named on the sheet. Popular poetry in décimas, sung a lo divino and a lo humano, is still practised by Chilean cantores and payadores, so work with them, and credit them, rather than imitating their verse.