Style combination · Contrasts
Mexican Popular Graphics × Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
Posada's broadsheets carve tone and texture into relief blocks under shouting type, whereas codex painting has no tone at all, only contour and flat colour; keep them apart when the brief just says 'Mexican'.
Mix them and make something Mexican Popular Graphics Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
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) Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
- Type from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Colour from Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
- Form from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Composition from Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
- 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
Light
Alfa Slab One, standing in for Nineteenth-century display types: Egyptians, Tuscans and Latins
Text · Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
The painted screenfold books of Postclassic southern and central Mexico (not the Maya codices): long strips of gesso-coated deerskin, folded like a screen and painted on both sides. In the Mixtec histories red guidelines lead the reader in a zigzag through the deeds and marriages of rulers; in the divinatory Borgia Group, pages pair deities with periods of the 260-day count. Profile figures with large heads, glyphs for names, dates and places, and flat colour inside an even black contour make picture and writing one codified system.
Fira Sans; Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting used Calendar-name glyphs and Place signs, most built on a hill glyph that carries the attributes naming the town
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting, with a counter-accent from Mexican Popular Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
-
#f1ead8ground · 36% -
#1a1714ink · 14% -
#d49a2aaccent · 18% -
#f0d14aaccent · 14% -
#b22a2aaccent · 10% -
#d6337faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f1ead8;
--ink: #1a1714;
--accent-1: #d49a2a;
--accent-2: #f0d14a;
--accent-3: #b22a2a;
--accent-4: #d6337f;
--font-display: "Alfa Slab One", serif;
--font-text: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting: These books are Indigenous sacred and dynastic records: Mixtec speakers called them ñee ñuhu, 'sacred skins'; the Borgia Group almanacs set out deities and the ritual 260-day count, and the Mixtec histories record the genealogies of ruling houses whose Ñuu Dzaui (Mixtec) descendants live in Oaxaca, Puebla, Guerrero and the diaspora today. Almost all surviving books left Mexico during the conquest, the colonial period or the nineteenth century and are now in European libraries and museums; the Codex Colombino in Mexico City is a rare exception. 'Mixteca-Puebla' itself is an archaeologists' label, not a name the painters used: George Vaillant described a Mixteca-Puebla 'culture' or 'civilization', H. B. Nicholson redefined it as a style shared by Nahua and Mixtec artists, and its questions remain open. Do not lift deities, calendar signs or named rulers as decoration, logos or generic 'Aztec pattern', never invent pseudo-glyphs or present generated pages as historical, and work with Mixtec and Nahua scholars, artists and communities, crediting the codex and its people.
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.
- 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.
With Mixteca-Puebla Codex Painting
- Chicano Screenprint Poster Pairs well · Chicano screenprinters reclaimed Mexica glyphs and calendar imagery for the movement; when contour-and-flat-colour glyphs meet a modern poster, follow their example of community context and credit. Mexica (Aztec) glyphs are a different source from these Mixtec and Borgia Group books: credit a codex source as such rather than folding it into 'Aztec'.
- Northwest Coast Formline Design Contrasts · Both are Indigenous American sign systems of contour and flat colour, but formline swells and tapers its line into ovoids and U-forms in symmetric crests, while the codex keeps an even, unmodulated contour around profile figures strung along a guided reading path; do not merge them as generic 'Native' art.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Pairs well · Both keep a sequential story readable with an even, unmodulated contour and flat colour, without hatching or modelling; borrow the codex's red-guideline reading path for a clear-line page, as a formal analogy rather than a lineage.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Both tell information through standardised, repeatable signs and count by repeating units; codex day signs with counting dots are a precedent for pictogram-plus-number systems.
- Andean Woven Graphic Systems Contrasts · Andean signs are built on the thread grid and repeated as pattern, while codex signs are painted freely in contour and strung along a narrative path; do not merge the two as generic 'pre-Columbian'.
- Burmese Parabaik Painting (Konbaung Folding Books) Contrasts · Both are screenfold books, but the Mixtec codex reads glyphic figures along red guide-lines on flat colour, while the parabaik frames painted, captioned scenes with European depth.
- Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic & Register Composition Contrasts · Both are sacred pictorial records in contour and flat colour with no depth, but Mixtec screenfolds lead the eye in a zigzag along red guidelines past big-headed figures and name glyphs, while Egyptian pages keep strict horizontal registers and ruled columns of a largely phonetic script, with figures sized by rank and drawn to a canon; do not merge them as generic 'ancient glyphs'.