Style combination · Contrasts

Lebanese Civil War Party Poster × Polish Poster School

Polish metaphor and ambiguity are the opposite of a literal face, name and date; use the contrast to decide whether a commemoration needs an idea or a record.

From the research on Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

Mix them and make something Lebanese Civil War Party Poster Polish Poster School

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster, their arrangement from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster, the finish from Polish Poster School. 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.

Lebanese Civil War Party Poster Polish Poster School

Type from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Hand-lettering
Brush & pen calligraphy
Colour from Polish Poster School: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Emblems & badges
Naturalistic depiction

Polish Poster School avoids naturalistic depiction: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Composition from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Central symmetry
Single focal point
Surface from Polish Poster School: Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

Riot

Rakkas, standing in for Hand-lettered Arabic headlines in Naskh, Thuluth and Ruqʿa styles for martyr names, epithets, slogans and Qur'anic verses

Text · Polish Poster School

A painterly, metaphorical poster culture that flourished in communist Poland, chiefly for film, theatre, opera and circus. Working for state publishers, free of commercial pressure but under censorship, designers such as Henryk Tomaszewski, Jan Lenica and Roman Cieślewicz replaced star photographs with a single witty or unsettling visual idea, painted or collaged by hand and lettered in the artist's own handwriting.

Archivo; Polish Poster School used Henryk Tomaszewski's casual handwritten capitals and Brush- and crayon-drawn title lettering

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Polish Poster School, with a counter-accent from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Lebanese Civil War Party Poster Polish Poster School

#1c1c1c ground · 36%
#efe9dc ink · 14%
#d4352b accent · 18%
#f2c12e accent · 14%
#2f5d9e accent · 10%
#7b4b2a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #1c1c1c;
  --ink: #efe9dc;
  --accent-1: #d4352b;
  --accent-2: #f2c12e;
  --accent-3: #2f5d9e;
  --accent-4: #7b4b2a;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: These posters show real people who were killed, many of them young partisans whose families are alive, and some glorify attacks carried out as 'martyrdom operations'; most of the parties that issued them are still active and the war's memory remains contested in Lebanon. Do not use martyr portraits, party emblems or Shiʿa devotional imagery as edgy 'war poster' decoration: cite the posters as historical documents with their archive, have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, and remember that a party's colours and symbols still align a design with one camp. Hizbullah is banned in several countries, for example the UK (proscribed in full in 2019) and Germany (a 2020 ban on its activity that covers its symbols), where displaying its emblem can itself be an offence. The collections and Maasri's book also lean towards the Left and its Palestinian allies, while the Christian right fought its image war mainly on television, so the leftist look is not the whole war.