Style combination · Pairs well
Lira Popular × Victorian Letterpress
Take the jobbing printer's mixed display types for the headline block while keeping the crude cuts and columns of verse.
Mix them and make something Lira Popular Victorian Letterpress
01
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) Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type
- Type from Victorian Letterpress
- Colour from Victorian Letterpress
- Form from Lira Popular
- Composition from Lira Popular
- Surface from Lira Popular
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Victorian Letterpress
Fiesta
Abril Fatface, standing in for Fat face romans (Thorne, Figgins)
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Victorian Letterpress, 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) Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type
-
#efe4c9ground · 36% -
#1b1a17ink · 14% -
#b3322baccent · 18% -
#7a7064accent · 14% -
#d9b45aaccent · 10% -
#24477daccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe4c9;
--ink: #1b1a17;
--accent-1: #b3322b;
--accent-2: #7a7064;
--accent-3: #d9b45a;
--accent-4: #24477d;
--font-display: "Abril Fatface", 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.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Lira Popular
- Chilean Unidad Popular & Nueva Canción Graphics Pairs well · Set a flat-colour Unidad Popular poster beside a black woodcut frieze and ruled verse columns for a Chilean design that spans popular print and political modernism.
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Pairs well · Brazil's cordel puts one woodcut on a folded booklet cover; combine it with the Chilean single sheet for a series of verse prints that share one set of cuts.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · 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.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Pairs well · 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.
With Victorian Letterpress
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Sign writers and type founders traded letterforms; add brushed shading and drop shadows to wood-type headlines for a street-made feel.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Push Pin revived Victorian display faces with irony; mix one wood-type headline with modern illustration for the same knowing nostalgia.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · One face, flush left and white space against a centred clamour of faces: use the contrast to test whether hierarchy needs variety at all.
- Arts & Crafts Movement Contrasts · Morris reacted against exactly this commercial clutter; set the two side by side to show craft restraint versus jobbing exuberance.
- HfG Ulm Systematic Design Contrasts · A Victorian mixed-face handbill is the clutter Ulm's one-family rule was meant to cure; use it as a before-and-after foil.
- Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway) Contrasts · Its black-letter-dense, type-and-ornament jobbing page is the opposite of a picture-led page; combine them by hanging a wood-type title over a flat colour picture.
- Dada Pairs well · Raid Victorian wood type and stock ornaments as the Dadaists did, but scatter them instead of centring them.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Pairs well · Both are cheap letterpress print that shouts to passers-by; borrow the playbill's stacked display capitals, banners and rules for a comic cover's blurbs and price box, while keeping the comic's hand-drawn letters and keyline art.