Style combination · Contrasts
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster × West German Conceptual Film
Savignac's visual gag is drawn and painted to make people smile at a product; the Kassel poster finds its pun in photographs and silhouettes, and its humour is darker and aimed at a film's or play's subject.
Mix them and make something French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster West German Conceptual Film
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.
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow)
- Type from West German Conceptual Film
- Colour from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
- Form from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
- Composition from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
- Surface from West German Conceptual Film
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · West German Conceptual Film
Wow
Inter Tight, standing in for Condensed bold grotesque for titles, set tight and often stacked (Panzerkreuzer Potemkin, 1967; Sturm über Asien; Der Malteser Falke, 1972; Rambow's Die Hamletmaschine, 1980)
Text · French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
The humorous street poster of post-war Paris, which took off in 1949 when Raymond Savignac and Bernard Villemot showed their rejected projects together and Savignac's Monsavon cow, its udder filling a bar of soap, went up on the walls. With Hervé Morvan they reduced each advertisement to one cartoon gag whose punchline is the product: a stylised figure brushed in a few bright colours on a plain ground, the brand name drawn into the picture and almost no other copy, printed as large colour lithographs until agency photography pushed it aside in the 1970s.
Archivo; French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster used Brand name painted by the artist into the picture, often in bold sans capitals on the product itself and Roman capitals over a lowercase italic line, lettered on the product
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster, with a counter-accent from West German Conceptual Film. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow)
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#f3eee2ground · 36% -
#1b1b1bink · 14% -
#d8291faccent · 18% -
#f3c63aaccent · 14% -
#25398caccent · 10% -
#ee8a8faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f3eee2;
--ink: #1b1b1b;
--accent-1: #d8291f;
--accent-2: #f3c63a;
--accent-3: #25398c;
--accent-4: #ee8a8f;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan): Savignac, Villemot, Morvan and Carlu are in copyright (Adagp, Paris), and some of their images are still brand property: Savignac's Bic boy is part of the BIC logo, and Orangina reissued Villemot's zest parasol on its bottles in 2011. Invent your own gag for your own product rather than redrawing the Monsavon cow, the Maggi ox or the Bic boy, do not prompt an image model for a named affichiste's hand, and never present a generated image as a vintage affiche.
West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow): Some posters turn Nazi imagery against itself: a swastika of broken pencils over the 1938 member list of the exiled German PEN (P.E.N. im Exil, 1983) and an egg given Hitler's forelock and moustache (Sein oder Nichtsein, 1964). Displaying Nazi symbols is restricted by law in Germany and several other countries outside contexts such as art, satire, education and history, so keep any such sign unmistakably critical and check the rules where the work will be shown. Rambow's Othello poster (1978) appears to show a face in dark stage make-up, the blackface convention for the role that is now widely rejected: do not borrow it. The posters and their photographs (Hillmann, Rambow, Lienemeyer, van de Sand, Abisag Tüllmann) are in copyright: stage and photograph your own object or cut your own silhouette instead of recreating a poster.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · The grid, neutral sans and photography of the same decades are its opposite in tone; one hand-drawn gag dropped into a Swiss layout makes a deliberate, disarming tension.
- UPA & Cartoon Modern Pairs well · UPA's flat, slipped colour and deadpan caricature carry the same good-natured wit into motion; use it to animate a gag poster for screens.
- Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat) Contrasts · Its Swiss contemporary paints the product as a modelled, larger-than-life icon; choose between wit by cartoon drawing and wit by illusion, or set one against the other.
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Contrasts · The same Paris walls twenty years apart: the gag poster sells a product with one good-natured colour-lithograph joke, while the 1968 students' one-colour screenprints turn the same single image and hand-lettered slogan to agitation.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Borrow Push Pin's invented display lettering and period quotation to give a gag poster an editorial voice, but keep the single joke and the empty ground.
- Illustrated Rom-Com Book Cover (Cartoon Couple Cover) Pairs well · Savignac's and Villemot's one-figure, one-prop sight gags on a flat ground are the model for a strong premise image; borrow the single visual pun to sharpen a cover that has drifted into two figures simply standing side by side.
- Natural Wine Label Art Pairs well · Both put one cartoon figure on a plain ground with the name drawn into the picture; the gag poster is a professional's single punchline at hoarding scale, the wine label an amateur's picture at bottle scale. Borrow Savignac's one-image-one-idea discipline to keep a naive label from turning into a scrapbook.
With West German Conceptual Film
- Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat) Contrasts · Both isolate one object on a plain ground, but Basel paints a product in glossy lithographic realism to sell it; here the object stands for a film's theme, is cut to a flat silhouette or a grainy photograph, and rarely flatters.
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Pairs well · Heartfield tied four bloody axes into a swastika in 1934; Rambow's broken pencils laid into a swastika over a 1938 PEN list (1983) make the same move of an object turned into an emblem. Borrow the AIZ caption when the poster must accuse, and Rambow's wordless object when it should commemorate.
- Polish Poster School Contrasts · Its contemporary in art-film posters: the Polish school paints the metaphor and letters the title by hand in loose brushwork; take the Kassel route when the same single idea should come from a cropped photograph or a hard silhouette with set grotesque type.
- Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve Pairs well · Hipgnosis also builds impossible scenes for the camera and lets the photograph vouch for them; add Rambow's plain ground and one line of set grotesque when such a staged photo has to work as a street poster rather than a record sleeve.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Contrasts · The ICAIC film posters of revolutionary Cuba also read a film metaphorically and reduce it to one silhouette or visual pun in screenprint, but they let flat, saturated, Pop and psychedelic colour carry the energy and draw or hand-cut the title letters; the Kassel poster mostly keeps to black and one or two inks, a photograph or a hard silhouette and set grotesque type.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Shares the set grotesque, flat inks and ornament-free ground, but rejects Swiss objectivity: each poster carries one visual metaphor and a new typographic choice per film instead of a grid and a neutral system.
- Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics Contrasts · Hillmann's posters also refuse star portraits and reduce a film to one sign, but they are static sheets set in grotesque type that often find the sign in a grainy photograph; Bass draws and cuts the sign by hand and builds it as a moving title before it becomes a poster.
- Israeli Political Poster (Tartakover to Lemel) Contrasts · Both can concentrate a poster into a photographed paradox and a set sans-serif title; choose the Israeli dissenting core when Hebrew slogans, national visual memory and the artist as critical witness must carry the argument, rather than a sign extracted from a film or play. Lemel's exhibition and pandemic images remain points of overlap, not a uniquely Israeli photographic technique.