Style combination · Contrasts
Mexican Popular Graphics × Simplicissimus Satirical Style
A contemporary in cheap satirical print around 1900 (Simplicissimus cost 10 pfennig an issue), but Posada's broadsheets pair a heavy relief cut with white-line hatching and shouting mixed display type above columns of verse, black on coloured paper; Simplicissimus gives one clean-contoured drawing with flat tints and a Fraktur caption.
Mix them and make something Mexican Popular Graphics Simplicissimus Satirical Style
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) Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
- Type from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Colour from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Form from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Composition from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- 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 · Simplicissimus Satirical Style
Wow
UnifrakturMaguntia, standing in for Set Fraktur for the title centred above each drawing and for the parenthetical artist credit ('(Zeichnung von Rudolf Wilke)', '(Th. Th. Heine)')
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 Simplicissimus Satirical Style, with a counter-accent from Mexican Popular Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
-
#f0e6ccground · 36% -
#1b1a18ink · 14% -
#c4382caccent · 18% -
#d6337faccent · 14% -
#d6a444accent · 10% -
#5aa05aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f0e6cc;
--ink: #1b1a18;
--accent-1: #c4382c;
--accent-2: #d6337f;
--accent-3: #d6a444;
--accent-4: #5aa05a;
--font-display: "UnifrakturMaguntia", serif;
--font-text: "Bodoni Moda", serif;
}Use it with care
Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich): Its caricature works by types, and that cuts both ways. Some pages drew colonised Africans as caricatures even when the target was the colonisers (Heine's Kolonialmächte, 1904). From August 1914 the magazine backed the war and turned its satire on the enemy nations, including racist pictures of non-European and Russian troops, and in the Weimar years it still ran nationalist jokes against the Allied victors and France. After 1933 it followed the Nazi line, including antisemitic satire, while Heine, hated by the Nazis not least for his Jewish origin, was forced out and fled. Several of its canonical draughtsmen served the regime: Hitler made Thöny an honorary professor in 1938 and put him on the Gottbegnadeten list in 1944; Schilling, a fierce critic of the Nazis before 1933, became their propagandist; and in the last issue of September 1944 Gulbransson, Schilling and Thöny supplied propaganda drawings. Take the method of 1896–1914 and 1919–1933 (one framed drawing, flat tints, a spoken punchline) and aim it at power. Exaggerate the uniform, bearing and costume of the powerful, not ethnicity, religion, disability or the bodies of the powerless. The profiteer, the usurer and the octopus gripping its victims (Heine's Der Wucher, 1923) were also stock antisemitic codes in these years, so mark a profiteer by class (top hat, monocle, fur collar), never by ethnic features. Gulbransson (d. 1958), George Grosz (d. 1959) and Bruno Paul (d. 1968) are still in copyright in the EU, until the end of 2028, 2029 and 2038; Heine's work has been public domain there since 2019. Draw your own, do not present a new design as a Simplicissimus page, and do not use the bulldog as a mark.
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 Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Expressionist Woodcut Graphics Contrasts · Both distort the figure in protest, but Expressionist prints gouge it from the woodblock with angular, raw marks; Simplicissimus keeps a clean brush contour and flat tints, and adds a punchline.
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · The parent: Heine took over the Jugendstil idiom, but where Art Nouveau spends the whiplash line on flowers and idealised women, Simplicissimus spends it on a grotesque type and a caption. Choose it when the curve should mock rather than adorn.
- Japonisme Pairs well · Heine drew on Japanese woodcuts: add japonisme's cropped asymmetry and silhouetted figures against blank grounds to give a caricature more air and bite.
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat Pairs well · The NDB places Heine's posters at the start of the new poster style: borrow the Sachplakat's single object and bold block lettering for a satirical poster that keeps Simplicissimus's flat silhouette and red-on-black.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · A later weekly humour magazine of the same satirical stance: Gırgır, Penguen and Uykusuz pack covers with speech balloons, comic strips and colour; Simplicissimus gives one framed drawing and one caption.
- Gothic Blackletter & Fraktur Tradition Pairs well · Set the title and the spoken caption in Fraktur, as the magazine did on almost every page, to anchor a caricature in German print culture around 1900.
- Dada Contrasts · George Grosz drew for Simplicissimus but in Berlin Dada turned satire into photomontage and typographic chaos; choose Simplicissimus for a drawn, legible joke, Dada for a cut-up assault.
- Moomin Graphics (Tove Jansson's Pen-Drawn World and its Licensed Afterlife) Contrasts · Jansson drew political satire for the Finland-Swedish magazine Garm in the broad European satirical-magazine tradition that Simplicissimus led; Moomin keeps a sure pen line but drops the upward-aimed attack and the grotesque body for round, gentle figures.