Style combination · Contrasts

Hungarian Revolutionary Poster × ROSTA Windows

Same year, opposite format: Moscow's stencilled comic-strip frames tell the news in sequence, Budapest's single lithographed giant states one demand at street scale.

From the research on Hungarian Revolutionary Poster

Mix them and make something Hungarian Revolutionary Poster ROSTA Windows

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

Hungarian Revolutionary Poster ROSTA Windows

Type from Hungarian Revolutionary Poster: Hand-lettering
All caps
Colour from ROSTA Windows: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from ROSTA Windows: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Hungarian Revolutionary Poster: Single focal point
Extreme scale contrast
Surface from Hungarian Revolutionary Poster: Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Hungarian Revolutionary Poster

Act

Big Shoulders, standing in for Heavy hand-drawn poster capitals for short Hungarian slogans and dates, lettered on the stone with the figure

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 Hungarian Revolutionary Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Hungarian Revolutionary Poster ROSTA Windows

#ece2c9 ground · 36%
#171512 ink · 14%
#c7281e accent · 18%
#c99a3b accent · 14%
#2d5b9e accent · 10%
#7d1d16 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ece2c9;
  --ink: #171512;
  --accent-1: #c7281e;
  --accent-2: #c99a3b;
  --accent-3: #2d5b9e;
  --accent-4: #7d1d16;
  --font-display: "Big Shoulders", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Hungarian Revolutionary Poster: Biró's red hammer man 'has been much repeated in Central European political iconography up to the present day' (MoMA), so it is still a live political sign. These are propaganda posters of a regime whose 133 days included the Red Terror, in which up to 590 people were killed; do not present them as neutral folk heroics. In Hungary the hammer and sickle and the five-pointed red star are restricted symbols under Btk. § 335 when distributed, used in public or displayed in a way that can disturb public peace, especially by offending the dignity of the victims of totalitarian regimes; keep them out of work aimed there. Never borrow the antisemitic 'Jewish Bolshevik' caricature that anti-communist posters of 1919 turned against the Republic, as in Manno Miltiades's poster in the USHMM's Katz Ehrenthal Collection.