Style combination · Contrasts
Mexican Calendar Chromo × Mexican Popular Graphics
Posada's broadsheets are black relief cuts under shouting type, sold for news and satire; the chromo is a full-colour oil painting given away to be admired all year, with the type kept small and out of the picture.
Mix them and make something Mexican Calendar Chromo 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.
Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)
- Type from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Colour from Mexican Calendar Chromo
- Form from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Composition from Mexican Calendar Chromo
- 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 · Mexican Popular Graphics
Square
Alfa Slab One, standing in for Nineteenth-century display types: Egyptians, Tuscans and Latins
Text · Mexican Calendar Chromo
Mexico's give-away advertising calendars, at their height from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Printers led by Galas de México kept studios of painters, among them Jesús Helguera, Eduardo Cataño, Jorge González Camarena and Josep Renau, whose large oil paintings were printed by offset above a sponsor's name and a small calendar pad. In an idealising academic realism touched by Hollywood glamour they staged Aztec legends as melodrama, charros and chinas poblanas, saints, film stars and pin-ups, and hung all year in homes, shops and workshops.
Archivo; Mexican Calendar Chromo used The sponsor's name and address overprinted in the band left blank below the picture and Brand logotypes painted into the picture or carried on the product
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Mexican Calendar Chromo, with a counter-accent from Mexican Popular Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos) Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)
-
#f0c4a8ground · 36% -
#1f4e8cink · 14% -
#c8372daccent · 18% -
#d6337faccent · 14% -
#a8693faccent · 10% -
#5aa05aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f0c4a8;
--ink: #1f4e8c;
--accent-1: #c8372d;
--accent-2: #d6337f;
--accent-3: #a8693f;
--accent-4: #5aa05a;
--font-display: "Alfa Slab One", serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Mexican Calendar Chromo (Cromos calendáricos): The Aztec scenes are a nationalist fantasy of the pre-Hispanic past painted by academically trained artists, several of them born or raised in Spain, not Indigenous art: do not present them as Nahua or Mexica tradition or copy their feathered costumes as if they were ethnography. The saints and the Virgin of Guadalupe are devotional images that many owners pray before, so do not parody them, and the pin-ups were painted, as a UNAM study of the Galas archive puts it, to satisfy male longing and promote the sponsors' brands, carrying old and new stereotypes of women. The paintings are still in copyright (Helguera died in 1971) and Grupo Carso holds the rights to the Galas archive, while Alta reported in 2023 that Calendarios Landin owns the rights to Helguera, so paint new pictures in the manner rather than retouching old chromos.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Mexican Calendar Chromo
- Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai Contrasts · Both are tobacco-sponsored calendar pictures of beauties, but yuefenpai set softly rubbed watercolour women inside decorative borders with the products alongside, while the Mexican chromo is an oil painting of a whole scene that fills the sheet, with the pad pasted at its foot.
- Egyptian Painted Film Poster Contrasts · Both paint the stars of a national cinema's golden age, but the Egyptian poster collages star heads under huge calligraphic titles, while the chromo paints one unified scene and keeps its lettering to a small band below.
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · Both idealise the nation in heroic academic realism, but the Socialist Realist poster adds slogans and marching crowds to mobilise, while the chromo sells beer and cigarettes with romance and nostalgia; borrow its heroic anatomy for a national-history scene and leave the slogan out.
- Lotería Card Imagery (Mexican Lotería) 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.
- Hand-Painted Signage & Vernacular Lettering Pairs well · Grocery stores, poultry shops and workshops gave the calendars to their customers; pair a painted rótulo for the shop's name with a chromo-style painting for the look of a mid-century Mexican neighbourhood business.
- Taller de Gráfica Popular Contrasts · Both grew out of post-revolutionary Mexico and picture its history, but the TGP cut black-and-white linocuts and woodcuts with bold headlines for popular and anti-fascist struggles, while the calendar painters made saturated oils of an idealised Mexico to sell beer and cigarettes.
- Indian Calendar & Bazaar Art Contrasts · Both are give-away calendars that reproduce commissioned paintings above a sponsor's name, but Indian bazaar art centres a frontal deity in haloes, gold and ornamental frames for worship, while the Mexican chromo stages a secular scene in deep landscape (a legend, a charro, a film star, a pin-up) with no frame around it; its saints are one genre among many.
- Chicano Screenprint Poster Contrasts · Many Chicanos grew up with these give-away calendars hanging at home, and Chicano workshops took up the calendar as a fundraising print (Méchicano Art Center's 1977 Calendario), but, in Terezita Romo's words, revised its single image format, offset medium and commercial objective: screenprinted flat colour and political and cultural messages in place of a brand's modelled oil scene.
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.