Style combination · Contrasts

Lebanese Civil War Party Poster × Syrian Revolution Graphics

Party-branded martyr obituaries with emblems and leaders against irreverent sheets, signed only by a town or a collective, that answer one leader's cult; the contrast shows what a poster without a party looks like.

From the research on Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

Mix them and make something Lebanese Civil War Party Poster Syrian Revolution Graphics

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 Syrian Revolution Graphics. 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 Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

Type from Syrian Revolution Graphics: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from Syrian Revolution Graphics: Limited spot colours
Monochrome
Form from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Emblems & badges
Naturalistic depiction
Composition from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Central symmetry
Single focal point
Surface from Syrian Revolution Graphics: Halftone & Ben-Day dots
Grain & noise

The type

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

Display · Syrian Revolution Graphics

Now!

Rakkas, standing in for Freely brushed Arabic calligraphy for one- or two-word slogans, composed for each poster rather than typed in a stock font; one member said he sometimes spent two days designing a single word such as 'freedom' or 'revolution', and that some pieces drew on Persian calligraphy (Al-Safir interview, 2012)

Text · Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

The posters that some twenty parties and militias pasted on the walls of Beirut and other towns between 1975 and 1990, marking each quarter as one faction's territory. With no state style, every party branded its sheets with its own name, emblem, colours, leader and slogans. The staple was the martyr poster: a public obituary with the fallen partisan's straight photograph, name and dates under a header naming the party, often with its emblem, issued in series. Leftist parties also commissioned painters, and Hizbullah and Amal had martyrs painted into symbolic scenes.

Archivo; Lebanese Civil War Party Poster used Hand-lettered Arabic headlines in Naskh, Thuluth and Ruqʿa styles for martyr names, epithets, slogans and Qur'anic verses and Typeset Arabic Naskh text for the martyr's biography and dates

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Syrian Revolution Graphics, 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 Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

#f1ece0 ground · 36%
#151515 ink · 14%
#c8102e accent · 18%
#f2c12e accent · 14%
#e0912f accent · 10%
#007a3d accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1ece0;
  --ink: #151515;
  --accent-1: #c8102e;
  --accent-2: #f2c12e;
  --accent-3: #e0912f;
  --accent-4: #007a3d;
  --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.

Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives): These graphics come from an uprising met with massacres, sieges, detention and disappearance, and their makers worked under pseudonyms at real risk: Raed Fares and Hamoud Junaid were shot dead in Kafranbel on 23 November 2018 (local activists blamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which did not claim it), and the collective signed only with its own name, so never attribute a poster to an individual member or expose anyone who made this work. The martyr, siege, bread and Hama motifs refer to real massacres and real dead, not to an edgy 'war poster' look. The collective's posters were released under Creative Commons BY-NC, so do not use them or close pastiches commercially, and credit the collective, Kafranbel and the Creative Memory archive. The three-star flag has been the state flag since the HTS-dominated caretaker government took it up after Assad's fall, so using it, or Kafranbel's banners, as generic 'Syria' branding can imply an alignment their makers never gave. Have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, never fill a design with pseudo-Arabic, do not mock the broken English of some banners, which was written to be understood abroad, and never present a generated image as a work of the uprising.

The two styles

A vintage-style poster shows a black-and-white portrait of a young man wearing a patterned scarf, flanked by mirrored armed figures and red flags. Red Arabic lettering appears beneath a cedar-tree emblem with yellow rays, with mountains and buildings across the top and green leafy branches below.

1975–1990 · Middle East & North Africa Lebanese Civil War Party Poster The posters that some twenty parties and militias pasted on the walls of Beirut and other towns between 1975 and 1990, marking each quarter as one faction's territory. With no state style, every party branded its sheets with its own name, emblem, colours, leader and slogans. The staple was the martyr poster: a public obituary with the fallen partisan's straight photograph, name and dates under a header naming the party, often with its emblem, issued in series. Leftist parties also commissioned painters, and Hizbullah and Amal had martyrs painted into symbolic scenes.

A black-and-cream image of a child reaching toward a green flying dove appears beneath large red Arabic brush lettering. Ruined buildings and rubble stretch along the lower right against a textured cream background.

2011–2024 · Middle East & North Africa Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives) Protest graphics of the Syrian uprising from 2011, made to be photographed and shared online rather than to last on a wall. In Kafranbel, a town in Idlib, calligraphers lettered Raed Fares's weekly slogans on white cloth in Arabic and often in English for audiences abroad, beside Ahmad Jalal's dark cartoons that parodied Western films and album covers. The anonymous collective The Syrian People Know Their Way posted posters for activists to print: one figure in halftone, silhouette or loose outline under a brushed Arabic slogan, answering the Assad cult's monolithic iconography.

More combinations

With Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

With Syrian Revolution Graphics

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