Style combination · Pairs well

Dazibao × ROSTA Windows

Both are improvised agitational wall media made faster than print allows; pair their urgency for time-critical campaigns.

From the research on Dazibao (Big-Character Posters)

Mix them and make something Dazibao ROSTA Windows

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from ROSTA Windows, their arrangement from ROSTA Windows, the finish from Dazibao. 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.

Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) ROSTA Windows

Type from Dazibao: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from ROSTA Windows: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from ROSTA Windows: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from ROSTA Windows: Framed panels
Sequential narrative
Surface from Dazibao: Painterly brushwork
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

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

Display · Dazibao

Wake

Shippori Mincho, standing in for Freehand brush kaishu and xingshu (regular and running script)

Text · ROSTA Windows

Hand-stencilled satirical news posters made by the Russian Telegraph Agency during the Civil War and hung in empty shop windows, first in Moscow, then in Petrograd and provincial towns. Mikhail Cheremnykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Moor and others turned the day's news into numbered sequences of crude, flat stock figures in two or three colours, each frame with a short rhymed caption, reviving the lubok as Futurist street agitation.

Archivo; ROSTA Windows used Hand-lettered Cyrillic captions in brush and pen, one under each frame and Blocky hand-drawn Cyrillic capitals for headings and frame numbers

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from ROSTA Windows, with a counter-accent from Dazibao. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) ROSTA Windows

#ece2c9 ground · 39%
#171512 ink · 15%
#c7281e accent · 20%
#c99a3b accent · 15%
#2d5b9e accent · 11%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ece2c9;
  --ink: #171512;
  --accent-1: #c7281e;
  --accent-2: #c99a3b;
  --accent-3: #2d5b9e;
  --font-display: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Dazibao (Big-Character Posters): Dazibao were instruments of denunciation: in the Anti-Rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution they named, humiliated and incited violence against real people, many of whom were persecuted or died. Do not use the look as playful 'Chinese protest' decoration or for mock denunciations of real individuals, have any Chinese text written or checked by a fluent writer, and treat surviving posters and photographs as testimony.

The two styles

1957–1980 · East Asia Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) Handwritten wall posters in large brush characters that turned the walls of Mao-era China into a public forum for criticism, denunciation and, at the Democracy Wall, dissent. Written by anyone, in black or red ink on white or red paper, without printed type or pictures, they were pasted edge to edge and over each other until walls, mat screens and corridors became one dense, ever-changing field of text. The right to write them was struck from the constitution in 1980.

A vintage-style poster with a large red Cyrillic headline shows four numbered panels of a worker waking beside an alarm clock, walking hunched toward a smoky factory, operating machinery, and striding cheerfully beneath a red sun. Red, blue, and black illustrations sit on textured cream paper within thick black borders.

1919–1922 · Eastern Europe ROSTA Windows Hand-stencilled satirical news posters made by the Russian Telegraph Agency during the Civil War and hung in empty shop windows, first in Moscow, then in Petrograd and provincial towns. Mikhail Cheremnykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Moor and others turned the day's news into numbered sequences of crude, flat stock figures in two or three colours, each frame with a short rhymed caption, reviving the lubok as Futurist street agitation.