Style combination · Pairs well
Literatura de Cordel Woodcut × Tropicália Graphic Design
The cangaceiro hero of the north-eastern chapbook stands behind Duarte's Corisco; a cordel woodcut figure in a Tropicalist field of saturated colour keeps the popular and the Pop in one frame.
Mix them and make something Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Tropicália Graphic Design
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.
Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Tropicália Graphic Design
- Type from Tropicália Graphic Design
- Colour from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
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Tropicália Graphic Design avoids monochrome: this is where the two pull against each other.
- Form from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
- Composition from Tropicália Graphic Design
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Literatura de Cordel Woodcut avoids collage & layering: this is where the two pull against each other.
- Surface from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Tropicália Graphic Design
Pop
Federant, standing in for Art Nouveau-revival hand lettering (Rogério Duarte, Caetano Veloso, 1968)
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Literatura de Cordel Woodcut, with a counter-accent from Tropicália Graphic Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Tropicália Graphic Design
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#ece4cfground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#e8c95aaccent · 18% -
#d6177aaccent · 14% -
#b33a2eaccent · 10% -
#d98a9eaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ece4cf;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #e8c95a;
--accent-2: #d6177a;
--accent-3: #b33a2e;
--accent-4: #d98a9e;
--font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Libre Caslon Text", serif;
}Use it with care
Tropicália Graphic Design: The posters and covers remain under copyright and the photographs show named, living or recently living artists: borrow the method (a cut-out photograph in a saturated drawn world, national emblems turned ironic), not a particular sleeve or face. Tropicália used bananas, parrots and the flag's colours to mock the exotic image of Brazil and nationalist good taste; using them straight as tropical decoration reverses its meaning. Since 2015 the flag and the yellow team shirt have also become widespread conservative emblems in Brazil, so a straight verde-amarelo pastiche aimed at Brazilian audiences now reads as a partisan statement.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Literatura de Cordel Woodcut
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print a cordel-style woodcut on a riso in one ink on tinted stock to keep the pocket-chapbook economy for zines and poetry pamphlets.
- Brazilian Concrete Design 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.
- Taller de Gráfica Popular Pairs well · The TGP cut relief prints for protest, cordel for storytelling; combine their black-line language when a narrative needs political edge.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Both put a single relief picture on cheap street print; borrow Posada's calavera satire but keep cordel's quiet, single-title cover.
- Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards Contrasts · Both cut stiff figures in wood with no perspective or modelling, but the cordel cover is printed in black only, with solid blacks and gouged white lines, above a plain letterpress title, while the tarot card colours an outline key through stencils and cuts its numeral and title into the same block; choose cordel for a stark one-colour cover, tarot for a coloured emblem in a numbered set.
- Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets) Pairs well · 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.
- Lubok Popular Print Pairs well · Brazilian cordel is another chapbook woodcut tradition; set rhymed verse and a single crude block together, as both do, for narrative print with a vernacular voice.
- Onitsha Market Pamphlets Pairs well · A sister market-pamphlet tradition from north-east Brazil; combine cordel's woodcut covers with Onitsha's found photographs for a cheap-print series identity.
With Tropicália Graphic Design
- Brazilian Concrete 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.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Pairs well · Latin American film posters of the same years: Cuba's single silhouette and flat silkscreen colour can calm a Tropicalist composition that has grown too crowded.
- Afrobeat Sleeve Art Contrasts · Both crowd a political record sleeve with photographs and drawing, but Lemi Ghariokwu states the argument openly as captioned satire, while Tropicália hides it in irony and allegory to get past the censor.
- Psychedelic Poster Contrasts · Shares the crowded field and swelling hand lettering, but San Francisco melts type into whiplash ornament for a trance; Tropicália drops a photograph of the singer into the middle and adds national emblems, kitsch and political mockery. Choose Tropicália when the image must argue, not only dazzle.
- Angura Theatre Poster Contrasts · The atlas's nearest genome and an exact contemporary: both mock national kitsch with photomontage, sun rays and crowded flat colour, but angura posters screenprint nostalgic Meiji and Shōwa photographs in fluorescent ink, while Tropicália offset-prints a photograph of the singer amid tropical flora and the flag's green and yellow.
- Bossa Nova Sleeve Modernism (César Villela and Elenco) Contrasts · The next Brazilian generation went the other way: Rogério Duarte's 1968 covers fill the field with saturated colour, drawn tropical symbols and swelling hand lettering where Villela left white space, high-contrast black and white and three red dots. Set them side by side to choose between cool restraint and ironic excess.
- Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22) Pairs well · Tropicália revived Oswald de Andrade's Antropofagia as 'antropofagia visual' in the late 1960s; combine Klaxon's spare two-ink letterpress with Tropicália's saturated collage when a Brazilian theme needs both wit and heat.
- La Movida Madrileña Graphics Contrasts · Both answer a dictatorship with ironic, saturated, hand-lettered Pop that swallows national kitsch; Tropicália did it under the regime, with cut-out photographs of singers in Art Nouveau curves, while the Movida came after Franco's death, drawing comics and sacred camp with a democratic city council paying for some of the magazines.