Style combination · Pairs well
Mexican Popular Graphics × Punk
Both are cheap, fast and irreverent; reuse stock cuts and coloured paper in zines for the same street-sheet energy.
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) Punk & DIY Zine
- Type from Punk
- Colour from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Form from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Composition from Punk
-
Mexican Popular Graphics avoids dynamic asymmetry: this is where the two pull against each other.
- 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.
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 Punk. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Punk & DIY Zine
-
#efe6cfground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#d6337faccent · 18% -
#ff2fa0accent · 14% -
#5aa05aaccent · 10% -
#d7191caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe6cf;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #d6337f;
--accent-2: #ff2fa0;
--accent-3: #5aa05a;
--accent-4: #d7191c;
--font-display: "Rock Salt", cursive;
--font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Mexican Popular Graphics
- 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.
- 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 Punk
- Russian Constructivism Pairs well · Borrow Constructivist diagonals and red-and-black bars to give punk collage the agitprop structure post-punk sleeves later adopted.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Run punk collages through a riso in fluoro pink and black to keep the DIY ethic while gaining richer, layered colour.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Deface a clean corporate identity with xerox collage to make the critique of polish and authority explicit.
- Frutiger Aero Contrasts · Glossy optimism is everything punk rejects; one torn xerox fragment on an aero gradient reads as instant sabotage.
- Fluxus Graphics (Maciunas) Contrasts · Both mix found type with appropriated pictures, but punk tears and photocopies while Fluxus keeps a clean offset black, justified blocks and a tight edge-to-edge grid; use the Fluxus version when cheap materials should still look ordered.
- Natural Wine Label Art Pairs well · Alice Feiring calls the earlier natural-wine scene punk rock: of Gut Oggau she says 'This is where things grow up and stop being so punk rock' (Punch, 2021). Take punk's refusal of professional polish but drop the collage and the anger: one felt-pen picture on a white label carries the same do-it-yourself stance in a friendlier voice.
- Grapus (French Militant Graphic Collective) Contrasts · Both scribble over photographs, but punk's photocopied blacks and ransom-note type are cheap and nihilist, while Grapus prints bright offset colour, mostly on white, in an optimistic, party-backed voice.
- Situationist Détournement Graphics Contrasts · Punk reprised the situationist prank in the late 1970s, but it packs torn photocopies and mixed type into crowded pages; détournement keeps a few recognisable fragments and lets each one say the opposite of what it said. Borrow the rewritten balloon when a punk layout needs a sharper argument.