Style combination · Pairs well

Hand-Painted Signage × Mexican Calendar Chromo

Grocery stores, poultry shops and workshops gave the calendars to their customers; pair a painted rótulo for the shop's name with a chromo-style painting for the look of a mid-century Mexican neighbourhood business.

From the research on Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Mix them and make something Hand-Painted Signage Mexican Calendar Chromo

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Mexican Calendar Chromo, their arrangement from Mexican Calendar Chromo, the finish from Hand-Painted Signage. 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.

Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

Type from Hand-Painted Signage: Hand-lettering
Script
Colour from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Full polychrome
Gradients
Form from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Naturalistic depiction
Restrained accents
Composition from Mexican Calendar Chromo: Single focal point
Illusion of depth
Surface from Hand-Painted Signage: Hard offset shadow
Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Hand-Painted Signage

Fiesta

Yellowtail, standing in for Brush script

Text · Mexican Calendar Chromo

Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops.

Archivo; Mexican Calendar Chromo used The sponsor's name and address overprinted in the band left blank below the picture and Brand logotypes painted into the picture or carried on the product

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Mexican Calendar Chromo, with a counter-accent from Hand-Painted Signage. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos)

#f0c4a8 ground · 36%
#1f4e8c ink · 14%
#c8372d accent · 18%
#c99a2e accent · 14%
#a8693f accent · 10%
#3d8b4f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0c4a8;
  --ink: #1f4e8c;
  --accent-1: #c8372d;
  --accent-2: #c99a2e;
  --accent-3: #a8693f;
  --accent-4: #3d8b4f;
  --font-display: "Yellowtail", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos): The Aztec scenes are a nationalist fantasy of the pre-Hispanic past painted by academically trained artists, several of them born or raised in Spain, not Indigenous art: do not present them as Nahua or Mexica tradition or copy their feathered costumes as if they were ethnography. The saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe are devotional images that many owners pray before, so do not parody them, and the pin-ups were painted, as a UNAM study of the Galas archive puts it, to satisfy male longing and promote the sponsors' brands, carrying old and new stereotypes of women. The paintings are still in copyright (Helguera died in 1971) and Grupo Carso holds the rights to the Galas archive, while Alta reported in 2023 that Calendarios Landin owns the rights to Helguera, so paint new pictures in the manner rather than retouching old chromos.

The two styles

An ornate rectangular sign reads “RIVER MARKET” in large cream-and-gold capital letters on a dark green background, with red shadows on the top word and blue shadows below. Gold borders and scrolling flourishes surround the lettering, with red decorative motifs in the black corners and visible painted texture throughout.

1800–present · Global / networked Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Letters painted by trained sign writers on fascias, windows, walls, vehicles and showcards, from Victorian gold leaf on glass to Mexican rótulos, Indian bazaar boards and Ghanaian barbershop signs. Brush-built letters with shading, drop shadows and outlines are fitted to the panel and mixed in a few styles for hierarchy, valuing legibility at a distance and the painter's flourish; vinyl displaced the craft in the 1980s and it has revived since the 2010s.

A painted-style poster shows a smiling woman in a floral embroidered blouse and blue skirt seated beside wicker baskets of harvested agave hearts. Agave plants, a town with a domed church, and distant mountains fill the background beneath the red and gold word “Agave.”

1930–1970 · Latin America & Caribbean Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops.

More combinations

With Hand-Painted Signage

All 29 combinations with Hand-Painted Signage

With Mexican Calendar Chromo

All 13 combinations with Mexican Calendar Chromo

Every style combination