Style combination · Pairs well

Lira Popular × Mexican Popular Graphics

A sibling street broadside; borrow Posada's coloured paper and single big cut, or keep the Chilean frieze of cuts over many ruled verse columns.

From the research on Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets)

Mix them and make something Lira Popular Mexican Popular Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Mexican Popular Graphics, their arrangement from Lira Popular, the finish from Lira Popular. 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.

Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets) Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)

Type from Lira Popular: Eclectic mixing
Condensed display
Colour from Mexican Popular Graphics: Monochrome
Flat fields
Form from Mexican Popular Graphics: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Lira Popular: Column grid
Layered information
Surface from Lira Popular: Carved line
Paper & letterpress bite

The type

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

Display · Lira Popular

Together

Grenze Gotisch, standing in for Nineteenth-century condensed and extended wood and metal display types, stacked and centred for the headlines ('VIVA EL 18!', 'Gran incendio en Guayaquil')

Text · Mexican Popular Graphics

Cheap broadsheets, chapbooks and gazettes sold on the streets of Porfirian Mexico City by the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and illustrated by Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada. A bold relief picture of crime, disaster, miracle or satire sits under shouting display type and columns of corridos, printed in black on brightly coloured cheap paper, while the calavera skeleton lampoons every class.

Bodoni Moda; Mexican Popular Graphics used Nineteenth-century display types and Modern (Didone) roman for corridos and verse

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Mexican Popular Graphics, with a counter-accent from Lira Popular. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets) Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)

#efe6cf ground · 36%
#151515 ink · 14%
#d6337f accent · 18%
#7a7064 accent · 14%
#5aa05a accent · 10%
#3b342c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe6cf;
  --ink: #151515;
  --accent-1: #d6337f;
  --accent-2: #7a7064;
  --accent-3: #5aa05a;
  --accent-4: #3b342c;
  --font-display: "Grenze Gotisch", serif;
  --font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}

Use it with care

Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets): The sheets show the real executions, murders and disasters of named people, and some verse 'a lo divino' is devotional; do not recycle a scaffold or a mutilated body as period gore for effect. Prodigy and scandal sheets ("El niño con dos cabezas", "La niña vestida de hombre i que se casó con otra niña") made a spectacle of real, often poor or gender-nonconforming people; quote them as history, not as freak-show novelty. The images are mostly anonymous, so do not credit a cut to the poet named on the sheet. Popular poetry in décimas, sung a lo divino and a lo humano, is still practised by Chilean cantores and payadores, so work with them, and credit them, rather than imitating their verse.

The two styles

A black-and-tan woodcut-style poster shows a haloed woman holding a leafy sprig between agricultural scenes, mountains, and lakeside villages. Four narrow panels below depict a guitarist and procession, a mother with a baby and fishermen, a shepherd with a dog and flock, and a praying woman above a stormy village.

1866–1930 · Latin America & Caribbean Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets) Loose verse sheets printed and sold in Chile's cities from 1866, peaking around 1890 and declining after 1920, though some were still printed into the 1940s. A band of woodcuts of crimes, executions, disasters, prodigies, wars and saints and a block of stacked headlines in mixed display types (sometimes above the cuts, sometimes below) announce the lead stories like a newspaper, and four to eight signed décima poems by one poet fill narrow ruled columns below, in black ink on cheap paper. 1880–1917 · Latin America & Caribbean Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Cheap broadsheets, chapbooks and gazettes sold on the streets of Porfirian Mexico City by the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and illustrated by Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada. A bold relief picture of crime, disaster, miracle or satire sits under shouting display type and columns of corridos, printed in black on brightly coloured cheap paper, while the calavera skeleton lampoons every class.