Style combination · Pairs well
Mexican Popular Graphics × Taller de Gráfica Popular
The TGP took Posada as its ancestor; combine his calavera satire with linocut political posters for socially engaged print.
Mix them and make something Mexican Popular Graphics Taller de Gráfica Popular
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) Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Type from Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Colour from Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Form from Mexican Popular Graphics
- Composition from Mexican Popular Graphics
- 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 · Taller de Gráfica Popular
Together
Inter Tight, standing in for Letterpress grotesque and slab-serif captions
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 Taller de Gráfica Popular, with a counter-accent from Mexican Popular Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Taller de Gráfica Popular
-
#f0e8d6ground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#c0392baccent · 18% -
#d6337faccent · 14% -
#d9c39aaccent · 10% -
#5aa05aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f0e8d6;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #c0392b;
--accent-2: #d6337f;
--accent-3: #d9c39a;
--accent-4: #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.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Contrasts · Isolate one calavera on an empty field to show how much of the style's force comes from crowding.
- 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 Taller de Gráfica Popular
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Both favour cheap, direct, monochrome reproduction; a linocut figure with photocopied type gives protest graphics hand-made urgency.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Pairs well · Combine TGP's black linocut figures with Cuban flat colour for politically engaged posters with a hand-made Latin American lineage.
- Art Deco Contrasts · Glossy Deco glamour versus gouged, populist black and white: use the contrast to separate luxury from solidarity.
- Chinese Modern Woodcut Movement Pairs well · China's 1930s–40s woodcut movement ran in parallel with the TGP; combine the two black-line traditions for prints about labour and resistance across continents.
- Minjung Woodcut Graphics (Korean People's Art) Contrasts · Nearest in the atlas, and the closest Mexican print lineage to the Mexican Muralism that MMCA names as a source: both cut black-line people's prints for movements, but TGP sets condensed Latin capitals and lithographs, while Minjung prints carry short Hangul slogans and dancing, ritual-derived figures, and are scaled up to geolgae banners.
- Brazilian Concrete Design Contrasts · Mexico's figurative, militant linocuts are Latin America's other modernism; contrast them to choose between abstraction and narrative.
- Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism Pairs well · Rojo set Leopoldo Méndez's engravings in the Revista de la Universidad de México (no. 3, 1971); a black linocut framed by fine rules on a white page joins Mexico City's militant print culture to its editorial modernism.
- Estridentismo (Stridentist) Graphics Pairs well · Leopoldo Méndez carried the Stridentist woodcut into the Taller de Gráfica Popular in 1937; give a TGP print a radio mast or a skyline on a steep diagonal and one bright ink to bring back the machine-age optimism.