Style combination · Pairs well
Ghanaian Movie Poster × Surrealist Graphics
Share dream logic and monstrous hybrids; use Surrealist juxtaposition to frame Ghana-style painted figures in an editorial layout.
Mix them and make something Ghanaian Movie Poster Surrealist Graphics
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.
Ghanaian Movie Poster Surrealist Graphics
- Type from Ghanaian Movie Poster
- Colour from Ghanaian Movie Poster
- Form from Surrealist Graphics
- Composition from Surrealist Graphics
- Surface from Ghanaian Movie Poster
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Ghanaian Movie Poster
Fiesta
Bungee Shade, standing in for Sign-painter shaded and drop-shadowed letters
Text · Surrealist Graphics
Launched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto, Surrealism sought the marvellous in dreams, chance and the unconscious. Its graphic legacy (uncanny collage from old engravings, solarised and cameraless photographs, impossible juxtapositions painted with illusionistic precision) passed through magazines like Minotaure into fashion, advertising and book design on both sides of the Atlantic.
Bodoni Moda; Surrealist Graphics used Artists' hand-lettered mastheads and Didone and Victorian display faces lifted from 19th-century catalogues
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Ghanaian Movie Poster, with a counter-accent from Surrealist Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Ghanaian Movie Poster Surrealist Graphics
-
#f6c90eground · 36% -
#111111ink · 14% -
#1e6fd9accent · 18% -
#a24a2aaccent · 14% -
#c1121faccent · 10% -
#6f8fb5accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f6c90e;
--ink: #111111;
--accent-1: #1e6fd9;
--accent-2: #a24a2a;
--accent-3: #c1121f;
--accent-4: #6f8fb5;
--font-display: "Bungee Shade", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Ghanaian Movie Poster
- Hand-Painted Bollywood Poster Pairs well · Combine Ghana's lurid invented scenes with Bollywood's glossy star portraits for a painted, maximalist film identity.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Contrasts · Minimalist film posters reduce a story to one symbol while Ghanaian posters cram in everything; reach for the latter when a brief needs maximal spectacle.
- Afrobeat Sleeve Art Pairs well · Another West African painted vernacular with bodies crowding the frame; borrow its looming heads for a sleeve's front and Afrobeat's strips for the back.
- Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster Contrasts · Its painted neighbour: Ghanaian video clubs had sign painters hand-paint posters for many of the same Nigerian films, alongside Hollywood, Hong Kong and Indian ones. Swap the cut-out photographs for brushwork on flour sacks to move from one to the other.
- Ghanaian Funeral Poster & Banner Contrasts · They share the walls of Ghanaian towns, but the movie poster is painted by hand on flour sacks with invented, lurid scenes, while the funeral poster is typeset on a computer around a real photograph; set one painted, exaggerated figure against a funeral poster's sober portrait for a deliberate clash of registers.
- Matatu & Nganya Art Contrasts · Both are commissioned African street art built on looming painted heads, but Ghana's posters are gestural sign-painter enamel on flour sacks that invent gore and muscle for a film, while the nganya's stars are smooth, airbrushed likenesses fitted to a glossy vehicle body.
- Kinshasa Popular Painting Contrasts · Same sign-painter roots, opposite use of words: Ghanaian posters letter only a film title to sell a lurid scene, while Kinshasa paintings fill the scene with commentary to be read.
- Pulp Magazine Cover Contrasts · A painted-sensational neighbour: the pulp painting is an original reproduced by offset under a printed masthead, while the Ghanaian poster is painted directly on the final surface.
With Surrealist Graphics
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Place a single dream image inside a strict corporate grid; the calm system heightens the strangeness.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Contrasts · Isotype's one-symbol-one-meaning is the antithesis of Surrealist ambiguity; decide whether the viewer should decode or be disturbed.
- Psychedelic Poster Pairs well · Psychedelic posters revived Surrealist dream imagery; combine them for hallucinatory figurative work with melting forms.
- Polish Poster School Pairs well · Polish poster artists fused Surrealist metaphor with painterly lettering; borrow the method for cultural posters built on one uncanny image.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Pairs well · Vaughan Oliver drew on Dalí and Surrealism; add an uncanny juxtaposition to a blurred, textured 23 Envelope photograph for a dream-like sleeve.
- Brodovitch Editorial Design (Harper's Bazaar) Pairs well · Take its isolated body parts, torn edges and dreamlike juxtaposition, but apply them to the photographic spread.
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Pairs well · Surrealist photography also makes the impossible look photographed; take its dream logic when a brief needs strangeness, and add the AIZ headline and caption when that strangeness has to land a political point.
- Emblem Book (Motto, Picture & Epigram) Pairs well · Both find meaning in the gap between a picture and the words beside it; pair a framed, uncanny object with a terse motto above and a short verse below for an editorial series that asks to be decoded.