Kanoon Children's Book Illustration × Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

A loose parallel, not an influence: flat colour and a bold figure-led picture-book sequence.

From the research on Kanoon Children's Book Illustration (Iran, 1965 to 1979)

Mix them and make something Kanoon Children's Book Illustration Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Kanoon Children's Book Illustration, their arrangement from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book, the finish from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book. 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.

Kanoon Children's Book Illustration (Iran, 1965 to 1979) Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Type from Kanoon Children's Book Illustration: Hand-lettering
Brush & pen calligraphy
Colour from Kanoon Children's Book Illustration: Full polychrome
Flat fields
Form from Kanoon Children's Book Illustration: Stylised figuration
Folk & sacred symbols
Composition from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: Isolated object
Generous white space
Surface from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: Grain & noise

The type

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

Display · Kanoon Children's Book Illustration

Pop

Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-lettered title forms

Text · Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Thin, large picture books made in Petrograd/Leningrad from 1922 to the mid-1930s for Raduga and the Gosizdat children's department led by Samuil Marshak, with Vladimir Lebedev as art editor. People, animals and machines are cut into flat, mostly unoutlined planes of a few bright lithographic inks and float on bare paper. Hand-drawn grotesque capitals frame the picture, and 'production books' show how things are made. Pravda's 1936 attack on 'artist-daubers' (khudozhniki-pachkuny) forced it towards naturalism, and in 1937 the Leningrad children's publishing house was broken up with arrests.

Inter; Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book used Heavy drawn Cyrillic block capitals and Grotesque capitals, one word diagonal

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Kanoon Children's Book Illustration, with a counter-accent from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Kanoon Children's Book Illustration (Iran, 1965 to 1979) Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

#f3e7cc ground · 36%
#1b1b1b ink · 14%
#e8b32e accent · 18%
#d23a24 accent · 14%
#2a7f8e accent · 10%
#4f9a5a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f3e7cc;
  --ink: #1b1b1b;
  --accent-1: #e8b32e;
  --accent-2: #d23a24;
  --accent-3: #2a7f8e;
  --accent-4: #4f9a5a;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: These books' makers were later persecuted: Vera Ermolaeva was arrested in 1934 and shot in a Karaganda camp in 1937, the Leningrad editorial office of the children's publishing house was broken up in 1937 with arrests, the poet Nikolai Oleinikov was shot that year, and Daniil Kharms died in a prison psychiatric ward in besieged Leningrad in 1942. Do not treat the idiom as cheerful Soviet nostalgia or propaganda pastiche. Its schematic types include racialised figures, such as Tsirk's Black violinist drawn as a solid black silhouette: simplify every figure with the same economy, and never use skin colour, hair or dress as an ethnic marker or joke. Lebedev (d. 1967) and Marshak (d. 1964) are still in copyright in Russia and the EU (life plus 70 years): draw your own figures and verses instead of reproducing their pages.