Style combination · Contrasts

Kultur-Lige × Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

The Leningrad picture book that followed is in Russian, uses flat cut-paper figures floating on white and drops folk ornament; choose the Kultur-Lige page when letters and ornament must carry a culture's memory.

From the research on Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design

Mix them and make something Kultur-Lige Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Kultur-Lige, 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.

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Type from Kultur-Lige: Hand-lettering
Type as image
Colour from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: Flat fields
Limited spot colours
Form from Kultur-Lige: 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 · Kultur-Lige

Hello

Archivo Black; Kultur-Lige used The scribe's square Hebrew script (ktav ashuri), written by a sofer for Sikhes khulin (1917), whose 'wonderful' style Lissitzky set out to match in his illustrations and Lissitzky's hand-drawn Yiddish verses lithographed into each picture of Had Gadya (1919), the refrain running along the margins and closing in a circle at the foot

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 Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book, with a counter-accent from Kultur-Lige. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

#efe4c8 ground · 36%
#1c1a18 ink · 14%
#d23a24 accent · 18%
#dca533 accent · 14%
#5b7bb5 accent · 10%
#8a9a68 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe4c8;
  --ink: #1c1a18;
  --accent-1: #d23a24;
  --accent-2: #dca533;
  --accent-3: #5b7bb5;
  --accent-4: #8a9a68;
  --font-display: "Archivo Black", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design: These books quote sacred forms: Hebrew letters, the divine name (written in Had Gadya), scroll formats and scribal square script, synagogue art and tombstone inscriptions. Do not use the letters as decorative glyphs or mirror them; have any Yiddish or Hebrew written and checked by a fluent reader, and keep divine names and scroll and tombstone forms off throwaway or commercial items. The movement was secular and Yiddishist, a modern Jewish culture in Yiddish backed by Jewish socialist parties, Folkists and left-wing Zionists, not the Hebrew, Zionist art of Bezalel and not religious art, so do not present it as a generic 'Jewish look', and do not reduce its folk figures to stereotyped shtetl types. Many of its people were persecuted: Ryback's father was killed in the pogroms, and Hofshteyn, Markish, Bergelson and Kvitko were executed in Moscow on 12 August 1952. Chagall (d. 1985) and Chaikov (d. 1979) are still in copyright: draw your own letters and figures rather than reproducing their pages.

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.