Style combination · Contrasts
La Movida Madrileña Graphics × Tropicália Graphic Design
Both answer a dictatorship with ironic, saturated, hand-lettered Pop that swallows national kitsch; Tropicália did it under the regime, with cut-out photographs of singers in Art Nouveau curves, while the Movida came after Franco's death, drawing comics and sacred camp with a democratic city council paying for some of the magazines.
Mix them and make something La Movida Madrileña Graphics Tropicália Graphic Design
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.
La Movida Madrileña Graphics Tropicália Graphic Design
- Type from Tropicália Graphic Design
- Colour from La Movida Madrileña Graphics
- Form from La Movida Madrileña Graphics
- Composition from Tropicália Graphic Design
- Surface from La Movida Madrileña Graphics
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Tropicália Graphic Design
Yay!
Federant, standing in for Art Nouveau-revival hand lettering (Rogério Duarte, Caetano Veloso, 1968)
Text · La Movida Madrileña Graphics
The graphics of Madrid's Movida, the post-Franco scene of new-wave bands, fanzines and night life usually dated from the Canito concert of 9 February 1980 and later backed by the city council. Punk's cut-and-paste fanzine met underground comics and Pop: drawn figures in loud colour, hand lettering over cut-out photographs of the scene's own people, the castizo tebeo mixed with cosmopolitan Pop, in Madriz, La Luna de Madrid, Madrid Me Mata and the posters for Almodóvar's first films; its painters and photographers added hand-coloured prints and saints re-staged with camp.
Archivo; La Movida Madrileña Graphics used Free hand lettering over cut-out images ('collage de rotulación libre') in Madrid Me Mata, whose masthead moves from a special display lettering to a plain sans ('de una tipografía especial a otra funcional de palo') and whose 'MMM' works as a zigzag of lightning and Comic-strip hand lettering for balloons, captions and titles in Madriz, La Luna de Madrid and the Cascorro Factory comics
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from La Movida Madrileña Graphics, with a counter-accent from Tropicália Graphic Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
La Movida Madrileña Graphics Tropicália Graphic Design
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#14b8b0ground · 36% -
#141414ink · 14% -
#ff5a1faccent · 18% -
#d6177aaccent · 14% -
#ff2e88accent · 10% -
#d9261caccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #14b8b0;
--ink: #141414;
--accent-1: #ff5a1f;
--accent-2: #d6177a;
--accent-3: #ff2e88;
--accent-4: #d9261c;
--font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
La Movida Madrileña Graphics: The Movida's makers are recent and partly living (Mariné and García-Alix still work; Ceesepe died in 2018, Ouka Leele in 2022), and their works and the Madrid Me Mata, Madriz and La Luna mastheads are under copyright: draw your own figures, titles and mastheads in the shared idiom, do not ask an image model for Ceesepe's, Costus's, Ouka Leele's or Mariné's hand, and do not present a generated piece as a period work. Its Virgins and saints, at once camp and devotional, were painted by insiders who grew up under Franco's National Catholicism; turning Catholic images into a joke or a sales gimmick from outside is a different act. The Valle de los Caídos that Costus quoted, renamed Valle de Cuelgamuros under the 2022 Democratic Memory Law, was built largely by Republican political prisoners and holds over 33,000 Civil War dead of both sides, Republicans among them: its imagery is not neutral decoration. The camp idiom came from a queer scene: Costus were a couple, and both died in 1989.
Tropicália Graphic Design: The posters and covers remain under copyright and the photographs show named, living or recently living artists: borrow the method (a cut-out photograph in a saturated drawn world, national emblems turned ironic), not a particular sleeve or face. Tropicália used bananas, parrots and the flag's colours to mock the exotic image of Brazil and nationalist good taste; using them straight as tropical decoration reverses its meaning. Since 2015 the flag and the yellow team shirt have also become widespread conservative emblems in Brazil, so a straight verde-amarelo pastiche aimed at Brazilian audiences now reads as a partisan statement.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With La Movida Madrileña Graphics
- Memphis Design Pairs well · Memphis showed its first collection in Milan in 1981, three years before Madrid Me Mata: add its clashing laminate colours, squiggles and geometric primitives to a Movida poster for a fuller 1980s postmodern look, keeping the hand-drawn figures and lettering.
- Angura Theatre Poster Contrasts · Both cram comic figures and their own country's imagery into flat, saturated colour with irony; Japan's angura posters were silkscreened for underground theatre from the mid-1960s, packed edge to edge with Meiji and Shōwa photographs, rising-sun rays and Mount Fuji around a central axis, while the Movida came after Franco's death and drew comics, hand lettering and cut-out photographs of its own people for magazines, bands and films.
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) Contrasts · Both are Spanish comics: Bruguera's Barcelona weeklies caricatured postwar losers in regular gag panels for children under Franco's censors, while Madriz and the Movida fanzines gave adults experimental, drug- and sex-aware strips, some of which barely told a story, paid for by Madrid's city council.
- Punk & DIY Zine Contrasts · The Movida grew from Madrid's punk bands and kept the photocopied fanzine and the cut-and-paste page; but where UK and US punk kept to black-and-white xerox with a fluorescent spot ink or two, ransom-note type and anger, the Movida drew its figures by hand, turned the colour up and celebrated the end of a dictatorship. Choose punk for protest, the Movida for a party.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Ceesepe worked after British Pop (Peter Blake, Peter Phillips), Zulueta's posters are plainly Pop, and Mariné modelled Madrid Me Mata on Warhol's Interview: borrow Pop's enlarged, flattened images and visible print for a Movida layout, and keep the drawn people and the Spanish camp.
With Tropicália Graphic Design
- Literatura de Cordel Woodcut Pairs well · The cangaceiro hero of the north-eastern chapbook stands behind Duarte's Corisco; a cordel woodcut figure in a Tropicalist field of saturated colour keeps the popular and the Pop in one frame.
- Brazilian Concrete Design Contrasts · The Brazilian rational design Duarte trained beside and then swallowed: the 1964 Deus e o Diabo poster keeps concrete's lowercase Helvetica and aligned text blocks, then splits them with one cut-out figure in a sun; the 1968 covers drop the grid altogether.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Pairs well · Latin American film posters of the same years: Cuba's single silhouette and flat silkscreen colour can calm a Tropicalist composition that has grown too crowded.
- Afrobeat Sleeve Art Contrasts · Both crowd a political record sleeve with photographs and drawing, but Lemi Ghariokwu states the argument openly as captioned satire, while Tropicália hides it in irony and allegory to get past the censor.
- Psychedelic Poster Contrasts · Shares the crowded field and swelling hand lettering, but San Francisco melts type into whiplash ornament for a trance; Tropicália drops a photograph of the singer into the middle and adds national emblems, kitsch and political mockery. Choose Tropicália when the image must argue, not only dazzle.
- Angura Theatre Poster Contrasts · The atlas's nearest genome and an exact contemporary: both mock national kitsch with photomontage, sun rays and crowded flat colour, but angura posters screenprint nostalgic Meiji and Shōwa photographs in fluorescent ink, while Tropicália offset-prints a photograph of the singer amid tropical flora and the flag's green and yellow.
- Bossa Nova Sleeve Modernism (César Villela and Elenco) Contrasts · The next Brazilian generation went the other way: Rogério Duarte's 1968 covers fill the field with saturated colour, drawn tropical symbols and swelling hand lettering where Villela left white space, high-contrast black and white and three red dots. Set them side by side to choose between cool restraint and ironic excess.
- Brazilian Modernismo Graphics (Klaxon and the Semana de 22) Pairs well · Tropicália revived Oswald de Andrade's Antropofagia as 'antropofagia visual' in the late 1960s; combine Klaxon's spare two-ink letterpress with Tropicália's saturated collage when a Brazilian theme needs both wit and heat.