Style combination · Pairs well
Lubok Popular Print × ROSTA Windows
ROSTA windows inherited the lubok's numbered, captioned panels and rhymed text; combine the two for sequential agitational posters with a folk voice.
Its folk ancestor: keep the lubok's numbered episodes and rhymed verses, but flatten the hand-coloured woodcut into stencilled silhouettes for speed.
Mix them and make something Lubok Popular Print ROSTA Windows
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.
Lubok Popular Print ROSTA Windows
- Type from Lubok Popular Print
- Colour from ROSTA Windows
- Form from Lubok Popular Print
- Composition from ROSTA Windows
- Surface from Lubok Popular Print
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Lubok Popular Print
Act
Londrina Solid; Lubok Popular Print used Hand-cut Cyrillic lettering in the block, from Church Slavonic-style semi-uncial (poluustav) to civil script and Rubber-stamped and stencilled lettering imitating lubok woodcut letters in Russian Futurist books
Text · ROSTA Windows
Hand-stencilled satirical news posters made by the Russian Telegraph Agency during the Civil War and hung in empty shop windows, first in Moscow, then in Petrograd and provincial towns. Mikhail Cheremnykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Moor and others turned the day's news into numbered sequences of crude, flat stock figures in two or three colours, each frame with a short rhymed caption, reviving the lubok as Futurist street agitation.
Archivo; ROSTA Windows used Hand-lettered Cyrillic captions in brush and pen, one under each frame and Blocky hand-drawn Cyrillic capitals for headings and frame numbers
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from ROSTA Windows, with a counter-accent from Lubok Popular Print. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Lubok Popular Print ROSTA Windows
-
#ece2c9ground · 36% -
#171512ink · 14% -
#c7281eaccent · 18% -
#e8b923accent · 14% -
#c99a3baccent · 10% -
#2d5b9eaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ece2c9;
--ink: #171512;
--accent-1: #c7281e;
--accent-2: #e8b923;
--accent-3: #c99a3b;
--accent-4: #2d5b9e;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Lubok Popular Print
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) 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.
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Pairs well · Brazilian cordel is another chapbook woodcut tradition; set rhymed verse and a single crude block together, as both do, for narrative print with a vernacular voice.
- Nianhua & Chinese Folk Print Pairs well · Both are hand-coloured market woodcuts; take nianhua's symmetrical auspicious emblems and lubok's crowded captions and satire for festive print that also tells a story.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Contrasts · Lubok's crowding is its voice; isolate one figure on white to test how much of the meaning lives in the jostling text.
- Imagerie d'Épinal & European Bilderbogen Contrasts · Both are pedlars' broadsheets coloured by hand, but the lubok crams verse into the gaps around its figures and brushes washes on freely, while the Épinal sheet keeps its text beneath a ruled frame and stencils colour across rows of repeated figures; choose the lubok for jostling satire and Épinal for an orderly catalogue or story.
- Narbut School (Ukrainian Baroque Revival Graphics) Contrasts · Popular, coloured woodcut exuberance against Narbut's academic, restrained black line.
- Kalighat Pat & Battala Bazaar Prints Pairs well · Both are cheap popular prints that mix piety with satire and splash colour on by hand; combine them for a folk-print exhibition or publishing identity.
- Đông Hồ & Hàng Trống Folk Prints Pairs well · Lubok's Mice Burying the Cat and Đông Hồ's Rats' Wedding tell the same joke about power; pair them for a folk-satire series or exhibition identity.
With ROSTA Windows
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · The heroic, naturalistic painting that displaced it in the 1930s is the exact opposite of its crude, satirical shorthand.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Shares the cheap, fast, many-copies ethos; stencil-and-sequence storytelling translates directly into zines and photocopied flyers.
- Russian Constructivism Contrasts · The rival revolutionary language of the same years: photomontage, set grotesques and diagonals against hand-stencilled cartoon frames; pick one register per message.
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) Contrasts · Both tell satire in sequences of crude, flat-colour stock figures with hand lettering; ROSTA hand-stencilled numbered news frames with rhymed captions for shop windows as open agitation, while Bruguera printed balloon gags in children's weeklies that end on a blow and keep the satire under the fun.
- Kinshasa Popular Painting Pairs well · Both are hand-painted satire with words in the picture for a street audience; borrow ROSTA's panel sequence to break a Kinshasa-style scene and caption into a strip.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · Both turn the day's political news into hand-lettered satirical drawings for a mass audience. ROSTA stencilled numbered frames as agitation for the new state; the Turkish weeklies caricatured whoever held power, from Özal to Erdoğan, and were banned or sued for it.
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Pairs well · Like the ROSTA windows, each sheet answers the day's news by hand with a stark figure and a caption; run single posters as a numbered sequence when one image cannot tell the whole story.
- Dazibao (Big-Character Posters) Pairs well · Both are improvised agitational wall media made faster than print allows; pair their urgency for time-critical campaigns.