Style combination · Pairs well
Cuban Revolutionary Poster × Taller de Gráfica Popular
Combine TGP's black linocut figures with Cuban flat colour for politically engaged posters with a hand-made Latin American lineage.
Mix them and make something Cuban Revolutionary Poster 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.
Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Type from Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Colour from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Form from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Composition from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- 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
Rise
Inter Tight, standing in for Letterpress grotesque and slab-serif captions
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 Taller de Gráfica Popular. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Taller de Gráfica Popular
-
#f2ede0ground · 36% -
#1c1c1cink · 14% -
#f5b81caccent · 18% -
#c0392baccent · 14% -
#d9c39aaccent · 10% -
#d6337aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2ede0;
--ink: #1c1c1c;
--accent-1: #f5b81c;
--accent-2: #c0392b;
--accent-3: #d9c39a;
--accent-4: #d6337a;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
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.
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.
- 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.
- Brazilian Concrete Design Contrasts · Mexico's figurative, militant linocuts are Latin America's other modernism; contrast them to choose between abstraction and narrative.
- 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.