Style combination · Contrasts
Mexican Popular Graphics × Minimalist Graphic Design
Isolate one calavera on an empty field to show how much of the style's force comes from crowding.
Mix them and make something Mexican Popular Graphics Minimalist Graphic Design
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 Popular Graphics (Posada) Minimalist Graphic Design
- Type from Minimalist Graphic Design
- Colour from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Form from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Composition from Minimalist Graphic Design
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Mexican Popular Graphics avoids generous white space: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- 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 · Minimalist Graphic Design
Tide
Inter Tight, standing in for Helvetica Neue (light weights)
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 Mexican Popular Graphics, with a counter-accent from Minimalist Graphic Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Minimalist Graphic Design
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#efe6cfground · 39% -
#151515ink · 15% -
#d6337faccent · 20% -
#8c8a86accent · 15% -
#5aa05aaccent · 11%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe6cf;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #d6337f;
--accent-2: #8c8a86;
--accent-3: #5aa05a;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
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.
- 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.
- Onitsha Market Pamphlets Pairs well · Both are penny print for newly literate readers; share the sensational headline and moral tone, but let Onitsha supply photographs where Posada cut relief blocks.
With Minimalist Graphic Design
- ECM Sleeve Aesthetic (Munich) Pairs well · ECM's record sleeves carry the same reduction into music since 1970: one corresponding image, a few lines of small type and a great deal of silence; borrow their wintry photograph and tiny type when a minimal layout needs mood rather than system.
- Ma & Wabi-sabi Aesthetics Pairs well · Add one imperfect texture or natural material so the emptiness feels contemplative rather than sterile.
- Memphis Design Contrasts · Memphis's clashing patterns are the antidote to minimal reticence; a single Memphis accent makes a minimal layout playful.
- Dark Tech Minimalism Pairs well · Invert the palette to near-black and keep the same reduction for a contemporary technology register.
- Neo-Andean Architecture (Cholets) Contrasts · Its exact opposite on ornament and colour; one symmetrical fluorescent panel in a white, empty layout reads as a loud statement of identity.
- Neoclassical Book Typography Pairs well · Set a single Didone headline in minimalism's empty, monochrome field for the classic luxury-fashion register.
- Renaissance Book Typography Pairs well · Keep classical page proportions and a humanist serif but strip the ornament to give minimal layouts warmth and authority.
- Afrobeat Sleeve Art Contrasts · Its exact opposite on density; a single minimal element on a Lemi-style sleeve stands out sharply, and vice versa.