Style combination · Contrasts
Polish Information Picture Book × Polish Poster School
The poster designer and teacher Henryk Tomaszewski is credited with a role in the revival, but the poster school puts one painted, metaphorical image on a poster, while the picture books refuse paint and fill a spread with a hundred small labelled facts. Choose between a single idea that provokes and a dense page that informs.
Mix them and make something Polish Information Picture Book Polish Poster School
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.
Polish Information Picture Book (Dwie Siostry) Polish Poster School
- Type from Polish Information Picture Book
- Colour from Polish Information Picture Book
- Form from Polish Poster School
- Composition from Polish Information Picture Book
- Surface from Polish Poster School
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Polish Information Picture Book avoids painterly brushwork: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Polish Information Picture Book
Pop
Londrina Solid; Polish Information Picture Book used Mrs White and Cartographer
Text · Polish Poster School
A painterly, metaphorical poster culture that flourished in communist Poland, chiefly for film, theatre, opera and circus. Working for state publishers, free of commercial pressure but under censorship, designers such as Henryk Tomaszewski, Jan Lenica and Roman Cieślewicz replaced star photographs with a single witty or unsettling visual idea, painted or collaged by hand and lettered in the artist's own handwriting.
Archivo; Polish Poster School used Henryk Tomaszewski's casual handwritten capitals and Brush- and crayon-drawn title lettering
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Polish Information Picture Book, with a counter-accent from Polish Poster School. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Polish Information Picture Book (Dwie Siostry) Polish Poster School
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#f4eedfground · 36% -
#1f1d1bink · 14% -
#e7b941accent · 18% -
#d4352baccent · 14% -
#e0876aaccent · 10% -
#8fbcd0accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f4eedf;
--ink: #1f1d1b;
--accent-1: #e7b941;
--accent-2: #d4352b;
--accent-3: #e0876a;
--accent-4: #8fbcd0;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Polish Information Picture Book (Dwie Siostry): The leading authors are living, named illustrators whose books are in copyright, so draw your own figures, maps and lettering instead of asking an image model for the Mizielińskis', Bajtlik's or Karski's hand, and never present a generated spread as a page from Mapy, Mamoko or another Dwie Siostry book. Picture atlases sum up whole countries in a few small figures: show people through what they do, make and celebrate, ask people from a country to check its spread, and avoid reducing a culture to costume, cliché or skin colour.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Polish Information Picture Book
- Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book Contrasts · Both explain the world to children in flat colour, but Lebedev's production books float a few large planes on bare paper while a Mizieliński atlas crowds the page with small figures and labels; decide between one clear object per page and a field to explore.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Pairs well · The same even, unmodulated outline and flat colour on a light ground; borrow Ligne Claire's clean contour and legible caption lettering, but scatter hundreds of small labelled figures across one spread instead of telling a story panel by panel.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Pairs well · Isotype's rule of one sign, one meaning keeps a crowded atlas spread legible; use a consistent pictogram for each kind of thing (animal, food, building, custom) and let the hand-drawn wit live in the details.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · The activity-book strand of the idiom, black line and one or two flat colours on white, prints well in two or three riso inks for a small-run children's workbook or museum trail.
- Corporate Memphis Contrasts · Both draw flat, simplified figures on light grounds, but Corporate Memphis uses them for mood around a single message, while here every small figure is labelled and stands for a fact; give each figure a job.
- Thaw Modernism (Soviet and Czechoslovak) Pairs well · Borrow the airy pages and laconic pastel figures of 1960s Eastern European illustration, which the Mistrzowie Ilustracji reissues keep in view, to open up a spread that has grown too crowded.
- Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway) Pairs well · Both put flat printed colour and picture-led narrative first; carry the toy-book key-block approach into a modern picture book.
- Kanoon Children's Book Illustration (Iran, 1965 to 1979) Contrasts · Dense, diagrammatic and all-over (and dated 2008 onward) where Kanoon is lyrical and narrative.
With Polish Poster School
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Painterly ambiguity versus objective grid and photography; borrow one hand-painted image to warm a Swiss-style cultural series.
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · The school defined itself against official heroic realism; use the pairing to show metaphor outperforming literal propaganda.
- Iranian Modernist Graphic Design Pairs well · Iranian designers absorbed the Polish metaphor poster; combine one surreal image with calligraphic lettering for cultural posters.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Both prize the illustrator-designer's hand and wit; pair Polish metaphor with Push Pin lettering for theatrical, idea-led posters.
- Polish Cold War Neon (PRL Neonisation) Pairs well · Some of the same artists drew posters and neons; take the poster's single witty idea and hand-drawn title and translate it into one line of light for a night version of a campaign.
- Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design Contrasts · The same conceptual-poster network: Turkish designers showed at the Warsaw Poster Biennale from 1966 and Ertel's posters entered the Wilanów archive in 1968. The Polish school paints, collages and distorts its single idea; the Turkish posters cut it into flat shapes in two or three clean inks. Choose Warsaw for unease, Istanbul for a crisp visual pun.
- West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow) Contrasts · Its contemporary in art-film posters: the Polish school paints the metaphor and letters the title by hand in loose brushwork; take the Kassel route when the same single idea should come from a cropped photograph or a hard silhouette with set grotesque type.
- Screenprinted Gig & Alt-Movie Poster Pairs well · Both swap the star's photograph for one idea; add the Polish school's painted ambiguity to a flat screenprint when a film poster needs to unsettle rather than wink.