Style combination · Contrasts

Dada × Simplicissimus Satirical Style

George Grosz drew for Simplicissimus but in Berlin Dada turned satire into photomontage and typographic chaos; choose Simplicissimus for a drawn, legible joke, Dada for a cut-up assault.

From the research on Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)

Mix them and make something Dada Simplicissimus Satirical Style

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Simplicissimus Satirical Style, their arrangement from Dada, the finish from Dada. 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.

Dada Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)

Type from Dada: Eclectic mixing
Rotated & vertical setting
Colour from Simplicissimus Satirical Style: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Simplicissimus Satirical Style: Distortion & exaggeration
Stylised figuration
Composition from Dada: Collage & layering
Visual tension

Simplicissimus Satirical Style avoids collage & layering: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Surface from Dada: Paper & letterpress bite

The type

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

Display · Dada

Riot

Alfa Slab One; Dada used Found wood poster type and Mixed grotesques, Egyptians and Fraktur from the jobbing printer's case

Text · Simplicissimus Satirical Style

The house style of the Munich satirical weekly Simplicissimus, set by Th. Th. Heine, Eduard Thöny, Bruno Paul, Rudolf Wilke and Olaf Gulbransson. Each page is one drawing that is the joke: an officer, priest, junker, profiteer or minister in a sure contour, black silhouettes and two or three flat tints inside a ruled frame, with a Fraktur title above and a punchline, usually spoken, below. It turned the Jugendstil line from ornament to caricature, and the 1898 Palestine issue brought confiscation and prison sentences for Heine and Wedekind.

EB Garamond; Simplicissimus Satirical Style used The hand-drawn SIMPLICISSIMUS masthead and Set Fraktur for the title centred above each drawing and for the parenthetical artist credit

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Simplicissimus Satirical Style, with a counter-accent from Dada. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Dada Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)

#f0e6cc ground · 36%
#1b1a18 ink · 14%
#c4382c accent · 18%
#d6a444 accent · 14%
#c85d80 accent · 10%
#93a1bd accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0e6cc;
  --ink: #1b1a18;
  --accent-1: #c4382c;
  --accent-2: #d6a444;
  --accent-3: #c85d80;
  --accent-4: #93a1bd;
  --font-display: "Alfa Slab One", serif;
  --font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}

Use it with care

Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich): Its caricature works by types, and that cuts both ways. Some pages drew colonised Africans as caricatures even when the target was the colonisers (Heine's Kolonialmächte, 1904). From August 1914 the magazine backed the war and turned its satire on the enemy nations, including racist pictures of non-European and Russian troops, and in the Weimar years it still ran nationalist jokes against the Allied victors and France. After 1933 it followed the Nazi line, including antisemitic satire, while Heine, hated by the Nazis not least for his Jewish origin, was forced out and fled. Several of its canonical draughtsmen served the regime: Hitler made Thöny an honorary professor in 1938 and put him on the Gottbegnadeten list in 1944; Schilling, a fierce critic of the Nazis before 1933, became their propagandist; and in the last issue of September 1944 Gulbransson, Schilling and Thöny supplied propaganda drawings. Take the method of 1896–1914 and 1919–1933 (one framed drawing, flat tints, a spoken punchline) and aim it at power. Exaggerate the uniform, bearing and costume of the powerful, not ethnicity, religion, disability or the bodies of the powerless. The profiteer, the usurer and the octopus gripping its victims (Heine's Der Wucher, 1923) were also stock antisemitic codes in these years, so mark a profiteer by class (top hat, monocle, fur collar), never by ethnic features. Gulbransson (d. 1958), George Grosz (d. 1959) and Bruno Paul (d. 1968) are still in copyright in the EU, until the end of 2028, 2029 and 2038; Heine's work has been public domain there since 2019. Draw your own, do not present a new design as a Simplicissimus page, and do not use the bulldog as a mark.

The two styles

1916–1924 · Central Europe, Western Europe Dada Born in wartime Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and spreading to Berlin, Hanover, Cologne and Paris, Dada used chance, absurdity and provocation against the culture that had produced the war. Its journals, posters and photomontages tumbled found type, ads and photographs into anarchic compositions that treated every letter as raw material and every rule of legibility as a target.

An oversized, stout man in a top hat and red waistcoat smokes a cigar while standing on a mound of gold coins. Poorly dressed workers reach toward him from below, with smoking factory chimneys and a domed building silhouetted behind them beneath the heading “Fortschritt.”

1896–1944 · Central Europe Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich) The house style of the Munich satirical weekly Simplicissimus, set by Th. Th. Heine, Eduard Thöny, Bruno Paul, Rudolf Wilke and Olaf Gulbransson. Each page is one drawing that is the joke: an officer, priest, junker, profiteer or minister in a sure contour, black silhouettes and two or three flat tints inside a ruled frame, with a Fraktur title above and a punchline, usually spoken, below. It turned the Jugendstil line from ornament to caricature, and the 1898 Palestine issue brought confiscation and prison sentences for Heine and Wedekind.