Style combination · Pairs well
Cuban Revolutionary Poster × Tropicália Graphic Design
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.
Mix them and make something Cuban Revolutionary Poster 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.
Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Tropicália Graphic Design
- Type from Tropicália Graphic Design
- Colour from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Form from Cuban Revolutionary Poster
- Composition from Tropicália Graphic Design
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Cuban Revolutionary Poster avoids horror vacui: this is where the two pull against each other.
- Surface from Tropicália Graphic Design
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Tropicália Graphic Design
Wake
Federant, standing in for Art Nouveau-revival hand lettering (Rogério Duarte, Caetano Veloso, 1968)
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 Tropicália Graphic Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Tropicália Graphic Design
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#f2ede0ground · 36% -
#1c1c1cink · 14% -
#f5b81caccent · 18% -
#d6177aaccent · 14% -
#e3342baccent · 10% -
#2d8a57accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f2ede0;
--ink: #1c1c1c;
--accent-1: #f5b81c;
--accent-2: #d6177a;
--accent-3: #e3342b;
--accent-4: #2d8a57;
--font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-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 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 Tropicália Graphic Design
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Pairs well · 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.
- 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.
- 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.