Style combination · Pairs well
Mexican Popular Graphics × Onitsha Market Pamphlets
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.
Mix them and make something Mexican Popular Graphics Onitsha Market Pamphlets
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) Onitsha Market Pamphlets
- Type from Onitsha Market Pamphlets
- Colour from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Form from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Composition from Onitsha Market Pamphlets
- 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 · Onitsha Market Pamphlets
Ours
Inter Tight, standing in for Jobbing grotesque and gothic capitals for cover titles
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 Onitsha Market Pamphlets. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Onitsha Market Pamphlets
-
#efe6cfground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#d6337faccent · 18% -
#b8312faccent · 14% -
#5aa05aaccent · 10% -
#e3a0a8accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe6cf;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #d6337f;
--accent-2: #b8312f;
--accent-3: #5aa05a;
--accent-4: #e3a0a8;
--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.
- 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 Onitsha Market Pamphlets
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Pairs well · A sister market-pamphlet tradition from north-east Brazil; combine cordel's woodcut covers with Onitsha's found photographs for a cheap-print series identity.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Set the pamphlet's crowded captions and sermonising titles against Swiss neutrality and white space when a layout needs a deliberate clash of voices.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Pairs well · Borrow the stepped, mixed-face centred title from the jobbing poster, then drop a captioned found photograph beneath it as the Onitsha printers did.
- Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster Pairs well · The same market print culture of eastern Nigeria, a literary rather than a visual ancestor: Okome hears the pamphlets' blurbs in Domitilla's jacket. Borrow the pamphlet's long moralising title and breathless blurb for the back of the jacket, not its letterpress look.
- Fotoromanzo (Italian Photo-Romance) Contrasts · Both are cheap popular romance print from 1947; the Onitsha pamphlets tell their stories in letterpress text with a recycled photograph only on the cover, while the fotoromanzo tells the whole story in staged photographs with balloons.
- Drum Magazine & Sophiatown Photojournalism Pairs well · Contemporary West African popular print for the same new urban readers; Onitsha's letterpress chapbook covers add a cheaper, home-made counterpart to Drum's hand-tinted cover girls.