Style combination · Pairs well
Lotería Card Imagery × Mexican Popular Graphics
Posada himself printed a Juego de lotería; pair the lotería card's single framed emblem and name with his black relief calaveras and shouting broadside type for a Mexican popular-print voice that is both orderly and satirical.
Mix them and make something Lotería Card Imagery Mexican Popular Graphics
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.
Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)
- Type from Lotería Card Imagery
- Colour from Lotería Card Imagery
- Form from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Composition from Lotería Card Imagery
- Surface from Mexican Popular Graphics
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Lotería Card Imagery
Fiesta
Londrina Solid, standing in for Hand-drawn capitals on homemade tablas and artists' redrawn decks
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
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Lotería Card Imagery, with a counter-accent from Mexican Popular Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)
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#f4efe2ground · 36% -
#1d1d1bink · 14% -
#c62f2aaccent · 18% -
#f0d14aaccent · 14% -
#86c8e6accent · 10% -
#d6337faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4efe2;
--ink: #1d1d1b;
--accent-1: #c62f2a;
--accent-2: #f0d14a;
--accent-3: #86c8e6;
--accent-4: #d6337f;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}Use it with care
Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería): Lotería is a living family game, played across Mexico and much of the United States and in parts of Central America, and a marker of Mexican and Mexican-American identity, so do not use it as generic 'Mexican' party decoration for products with no tie to those communities, and commission and credit Mexican, Central American and Chicanx artists when you redraw it. The standard deck's nine human figures are all stereotypes of Indigenous people, upper-class white people and Afro-Latinos (TIME, citing Gloria Arjona), most plainly El Negrito (No. 26) and El Apache (No. 38), stock figures of a Black man and a Native American, and other decks carry the same kind of figure (the feathered Indio with bow and arrow on Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas): do not reproduce them as period charm; replace them, as new decks freely do. The owners of Don Clemente Gallo (Pasatiempos Gallo) hold the registered trademark of the original images, so draw new emblems rather than tracing them, and write card names in correct Spanish instead of mock-Spanish.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Lotería Card Imagery
- Kanga (Swahili Message Cloth) Contrasts · Both centre one motif in a frame above a line of capitals, but a kanga is a cloth whose printed Swahili saying is its message, while a lotería card prints only the emblem's name and leaves the verse to the caller's voice.
- West African Barbershop & Hair Salon Signs Contrasts · Both lay out named, numbered pictures in rows and columns, but a barbershop sign is one hand-painted menu of heads that differ only in their hairstyle, under the shop's boast, while a lotería tabla is a printed board of unrelated emblems, one of a set of boards that each hold a different selection from the same deck.
- Chicano Screenprint Poster Pairs well · Chicano artists from Carmen Lomas Garza's 1972 tablas onward redraw the lotería card as a sign of Mexican-American home life; frame a screenprinted slogan or portrait as a numbered, named card to borrow that recognition.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Contrasts · Both set picture signs on a grid, but Isotype's pictograms are reduced, uniform and repeated to count quantities, while every lotería emblem is a different, fully drawn picture with its own name, matched by chance and read aloud.
- Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen Contrasts · Both are cheap coloured popular prints of stock figures in ruled frames under capital captions, but an Épinal sheet tells a story or musters a row of soldiers across many cases, while a lotería card holds one emblem and the tabla's cells have no order: the caller draws them by chance.
- Tarot de Marseille Woodcut Cards Contrasts · Lotería also gives each card one figure with its name at the foot, but in letterspaced sans capitals and soft offset colour; borrow the tarot's carved roman title band, ruled frame and stencil drift to make a lotería-type card set look older and graver.
- Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Contrasts · Both are popular Mexican colour prints for everyday use, but the lotería sets one flat, outlined emblem figure per numbered card in a ruled frame, named in capitals at the foot, for a game, while the chromo paints one modelled scene in deep landscape to hang for a year.
With Mexican Popular Graphics
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Both are cheap, fast and irreverent; reuse stock cuts and coloured paper in zines for the same street-sheet energy.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Contrasts · Isolate one calavera on an empty field to show how much of the style's force comes from crowding.
- Taller de Gráfica Popular Pairs well · The TGP took Posada as its ancestor; combine his calavera satire with linocut political posters for socially engaged print.
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Pairs well · Brazil's cordel covers are a parallel relief-picture-on-cheap-paper tradition; pair Posada-style broadsides with cordel woodcuts for street ephemera that tells a story in one picture.
- Lubok Popular Print Pairs well · Posada's broadsheets and lubki share cheap paper, crude relief cuts and street humour; brush lubok-style washes over a black relief broadsheet.
- Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen Pairs well · Posada's hojas volantes are another pedlar broadsheet with a crude relief picture over a block of text; add Épinal's stencil colour to a black relief broadsheet for a hand-coloured street print.
- Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics Contrasts · Same Mexico City walls a generation apart: Posada's broadsheets of skeletons, crimes and saints against Maples Arce's broadside of radio, speed and skyscrapers; set one beside the other to stage folk memory against the machine future.
- Lira Popular (Chilean Illustrated Verse Broadsheets) 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.