Style combination · Contrasts

Lira Popular × International Typographic Style

Both run on columns, but the Swiss sheet is airy and asymmetric; a lira layout shows how far crowding and centred shouting change the same grid.

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

Mix them and make something Lira Popular International Typographic Style

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Lira Popular, 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) International Typographic Style

Type from International Typographic Style: Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Type as image
Colour from International Typographic Style: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Lira Popular: Stylised figuration
Rules & bars
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 · International Typographic Style

Grid

Inter Tight, standing in for Akzidenz-Grotesk

Text · Lira Popular

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.

Bodoni Moda; Lira Popular used Nineteenth-century condensed and extended wood and metal display types, stacked and centred for the headlines and Modern-face roman for the décimas in narrow columns, with a short title, often in capitals, over each poem

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from International Typographic Style, 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) International Typographic Style

#f2f0e9 ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#e1251b accent · 18%
#ddcfa6 accent · 14%
#1f4e9c accent · 10%
#7a7064 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f2f0e9;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #e1251b;
  --accent-2: #ddcfa6;
  --accent-3: #1f4e9c;
  --accent-4: #7a7064;
  --font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-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.