Style combination · Pairs well
Plakatstil × Simplicissimus Satirical Style
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.
Mix them and make something Plakatstil Simplicissimus Satirical Style
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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.
Plakatstil / Sachplakat Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
- Type from Plakatstil
- Colour from Plakatstil
- Form from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
- Composition from Plakatstil
- Surface from Simplicissimus Satirical Style
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The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Plakatstil
Pop
Big Shoulders, standing in for Lucian Bernhard's hand-drawn block lettering
Text · Simplicissimus Satirical Style
The house style of the Munich satirical weekly Simplicissimus, set by Th. Th. Heine, Eduard Thöny, Bruno Paul, Rudolf Wilke and Olaf Gulbransson. Each page is one drawing that is the joke: an officer, priest, junker, profiteer or minister in a sure contour, black silhouettes and two or three flat tints inside a ruled frame, with a Fraktur title above and a punchline, usually spoken, below. It turned the Jugendstil line from ornament to caricature, and the 1898 Palestine issue brought confiscation and prison sentences for Heine and Wedekind.
EB Garamond; Simplicissimus Satirical Style used The hand-drawn SIMPLICISSIMUS masthead and Set Fraktur for the title centred above each drawing and for the parenthetical artist credit
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Plakatstil, with a counter-accent from Simplicissimus Satirical Style. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Plakatstil / Sachplakat Simplicissimus Satirical Style (Munich)
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#151515ground · 36% -
#efe5cfink · 14% -
#d2382baccent · 18% -
#e3b23caccent · 14% -
#24418faccent · 10% -
#2f5d3aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #151515;
--ink: #efe5cf;
--accent-1: #d2382b;
--accent-2: #e3b23c;
--accent-3: #24418f;
--accent-4: #2f5d3a;
--font-display: "Big Shoulders", sans-serif;
--font-text: "EB Garamond", 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.
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The two styles
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More combinations
With Plakatstil
- Corporate Identity Modernism Pairs well · Its brand-name-plus-object formula prefigures logo-led identity; pair it with a modernist grid for confident product campaigns.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Contrasts · Against a crowded multi-face bill, one object and one word show how much attention reduction can win.
- Flat Design Pairs well · Sachplakat is the ancestor of the flat product hero; borrow its single-object discipline to sharpen app and packaging graphics.
- Art Nouveau Contrasts · It was conceived against Jugendstil ornament; set a bare object poster beside a floral frame to dramatise clarity versus decoration.
- Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat) Contrasts · Its parent and nearest relative: Berlin's Sachplakat flattens the product into a silhouette in two to four flat colours with heavy block lettering, while Basel paints the same single object in full light and shadow, glass and tweed included. Choose Basel when the material of the product should sell it.
- Vietnamese Propaganda Poster (Tranh cổ động) Pairs well · Both reduce the message to one flat figure or object and hand-drawn words; use Plakatstil's plain ground to calm a busy red poster.
- Beggarstaffs Poster (Nicholson & Pryde) Pairs well · Bernhard and Hohlwein later made the flat silhouette and plain lettering a commercial system; Plakatstil is a later descendant, not a source.
- London Transport Design Contrasts · The Sachplakat reduced every poster to one object and a brand name, while Pick let each artist choose a different picture inside a fixed frame; use the contrast to decide between one formula and a curated plurality.
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.
- 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.
- Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada) Contrasts · 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.
- 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.