Style combination · Pairs well
Polish Information Picture Book × Victorian Colour Toy Books
Both put flat printed colour and picture-led narrative first; carry the toy-book key-block approach into a modern picture book.
Mix them and make something Polish Information Picture Book Victorian Colour Toy Books
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) Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway)
- Type from Polish Information Picture Book
- Colour from Victorian Colour Toy Books
- Form from Polish Information Picture Book
- Composition from Polish Information Picture Book
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Victorian Colour Toy Books avoids horror vacui: this is where the two pull against each other.
- Surface from Victorian Colour Toy Books
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
Yay!
Londrina Solid; Polish Information Picture Book used Mrs White and Cartographer
Text · Victorian Colour Toy Books
Mass-printed children's picture books in which a black key block and flat colour blocks (generally up to a dozen, as few as four), printed by Edmund Evans from wood, carried pictures that dominated short texts. The illustrators Walter Crane (flat tints and sharp outlines, influenced by Japanese colour prints), Randolph Caldecott (loose, comic movement) and Kate Greenaway (dainty colours and invented late-18th-century and Regency costume) gave the format three distinct hands under one genome; image.comic belongs to Caldecott only.
EB Garamond; Victorian Colour Toy Books used Hand-lettered titles and verses and Wood-engraved display lettering
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Victorian Colour Toy Books, with a counter-accent from Polish Information Picture Book. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Polish Information Picture Book (Dwie Siostry) Victorian Colour Toy Books (Evans, Crane, Caldecott and Greenaway)
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#f1e6ccground · 36% -
#2b2622ink · 14% -
#e0a93baccent · 18% -
#c4452faccent · 14% -
#e0876aaccent · 10% -
#4f7ea6accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f1e6cc;
--ink: #2b2622;
--accent-1: #e0a93b;
--accent-2: #c4452f;
--accent-3: #e0876a;
--accent-4: #4f7ea6;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "EB Garamond", 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.
- Polish Poster School Contrasts · 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.
- 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.
- 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 Victorian Colour Toy Books
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Contrasts · Its black-letter-dense, type-and-ornament jobbing page is the opposite of a picture-led page; combine them by hanging a wood-type title over a flat colour picture.
- Japonisme Pairs well · Crane's flattened planes and outlines owe much to Japanese prints; push the flatness further for a more graphic page.
- Arts & Crafts Movement Pairs well · Share borders and craft ideals; add Morris-style foliage frames to toy-book colour blocks for a gentler, heirloom storybook.
- Nordic Fairy-Tale and Troll Illustration (Werenskiold, Kittelsen, Bauer) Contrasts · Both are children's picture books of the same era, but the toy book's bright flat key-block colour and nursery cheer stand against this dusky, modelled and uncanny northern mood.