Style combination · Contrasts
Fotoromanzo × Onitsha Market Pamphlets
Both are cheap popular romance print from 1947; the Onitsha pamphlets tell their stories in letterpress text with a recycled photograph only on the cover, while the fotoromanzo tells the whole story in staged photographs with balloons.
Mix them and make something Fotoromanzo Onitsha Market Pamphlets
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.
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance) Onitsha Market Pamphlets
- Type from Onitsha Market Pamphlets
- Colour from Fotoromanzo
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Onitsha Market Pamphlets avoids full polychrome: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Form from Fotoromanzo
- Composition from Fotoromanzo
- Surface from Onitsha Market Pamphlets
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Onitsha Market Pamphlets
Rose
Inter Tight, standing in for Jobbing grotesque and gothic capitals for cover titles
Text · Fotoromanzo
The photo-romance of the Italian women's weeklies: a melodrama told in staged photographs, first printed by Il mio sogno and Bolero Film in May 1947 and copied from France to Brazil. Actors pose on modest sets or in familiar places, and the stills sit in a plain grid of ruled frames, often two or three to a row. Dialogue in balloons and boxes, lettered by hand or typeset, is pasted over the pictures, and close-ups of faces carry the drama. The weeklies printed the stories in black and white until colour took over in the mid-1970s; covers sold each issue with a photograph of the stars.
Comic Neue; Fotoromanzo used Hand-lettered capitals for narration and balloons and Typeset sans in later work
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Fotoromanzo, with a counter-accent from Onitsha Market Pamphlets. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance) Onitsha Market Pamphlets
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#f3f0e8ground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#c62a2faccent · 18% -
#2b5ba6accent · 14% -
#e3a0a8accent · 10% -
#8c8c8caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f3f0e8;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #c62a2f;
--accent-2: #2b5ba6;
--accent-3: #e3a0a8;
--accent-4: #8c8c8c;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Comic Neue", cursive;
}Use it with care
Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance): Photo-romances starred real actors, some later famous (Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren), and their photographs belong to publishers' archives such as the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori: cast your own models, never ask an image model for a real star's likeness, and never present a generated still as a vintage photo-romance.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Fotoromanzo
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Both read as ruled panels with speech balloons; choose the fotoromanzo when the cast should be real people posed in black-and-white photographs and the text may run long, and the comic book when drawn heroes, sound effects and flat colour tints should carry the action.
- Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism Contrasts · Drum's photographs report real township life under condensed headlines; the fotoromanzo stages fiction for the camera and runs it as a grid of stills with balloons.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Blow up a single photo-romance frame with its balloon to poster size for a Pop-style quotation of mass romance, as Lichtenstein did with drawn romance comics. Rewriting the balloons is a different precedent: Hara-Kiri's parodies and the Situationists' détournements of Nous Deux, not Pop.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Set the photo-story on an exact modular grid with a neutral grotesque in the dialogue boxes, so the melodrama sits in a clean editorial frame.
- Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Contrasts · Both are cheap picture stories read by millions in monochrome; lianhuanhua draws one framed picture per pocket-sized page with a caption beneath, while the fotoromanzo photographs actors and sets several frames to a magazine page with balloons.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Pairs well · The photo-romance was a raw material René Viénet named in Internationale situationniste no. 11 (1967), calling for photo-romances to be détourned by adding or altering their speech bubbles: keep the photographed lovers and the grid of frames untouched and change only the balloons, so that the melodrama speaks against itself.
- Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover) Contrasts · The postwar photo-romance sold love stories with photographed couples in close-up; the illustrated cover gives up the photograph so that readers can picture themselves in the role and the cover tells nothing of the heat level.
- Giallo Mondadori Covers (I Libri Gialli) Contrasts · Both sold weekly at Italian kiosks, but the photo-romance told melodrama in staged photographs and ruled grids, the giallo in one painted window; set them side by side to contrast photographic and painted suspense.
With Onitsha Market Pamphlets
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · Both are penny print for newly literate readers; share the sensational headline and moral tone, but let Onitsha supply photographs where Posada cut relief blocks.
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut 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.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Set the pamphlet's crowded captions and sermonising titles against Swiss neutrality and white space when a layout needs a deliberate clash of voices.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Pairs well · Borrow the stepped, mixed-face centred title from the jobbing poster, then drop a captioned found photograph beneath it as the Onitsha printers did.
- Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster Pairs well · The same market print culture of eastern Nigeria, a literary rather than a visual ancestor: Okome hears the pamphlets' blurbs in Domitilla's jacket. Borrow the pamphlet's long moralising title and breathless blurb for the back of the jacket, not its letterpress look.
- Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism Pairs well · Contemporary West African popular print for the same new urban readers; Onitsha's letterpress chapbook covers add a cheaper, home-made counterpart to Drum's hand-tinted cover girls.