Style combination · Contrasts
Polish Poster School × Turkish Modernist Poster
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.
Mix them and make something Polish Poster School Turkish Modernist Poster
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 Poster School Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design
- Type from Polish Poster School
- Colour from Turkish Modernist Poster
- Form from Polish Poster School
- Composition from Turkish Modernist Poster
- Surface from Polish Poster School
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Polish Poster School
Yay!
Londrina Solid; Polish Poster School used Henryk Tomaszewski's casual handwritten capitals and Brush- and crayon-drawn title lettering
Text · Turkish Modernist Poster
The posters of Istanbul's first generation of professional graphic designers for theatres, films, festivals and exhibitions. Mengü Ertel, Yurdaer Altıntaş and later Bülent Erkmen reduced each play or film to one visual idea or pun: a figure, mask, eye or object drawn as flat, simplified shapes in two or three inks on an open field of colour or white, with a hand-drawn or bold serif title. From the 1980s Erkmen pared the language down further to a giant word, a stripe or one photographed detail.
Newsreader; Turkish Modernist Poster used Hand-drawn title lettering by the designers themselves, e.g. Altıntaş's heavy lowercase 'aptal kız' (Kent Oyuncuları, 1961) and his condensed brush capitals for Dormen Tiyatrosu's 'Bugün Git Yarın Gel' and Bold and book serif titles centred above the image (Erkmen's Kent Oyuncuları posters and 'Les Civilisations Anatoliennes', 1983, in a Times-like transitional serif), and heavy serif capitals on Ertel's 'Jan Dark'ın Çilesi' and 'Le Gardien'
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Turkish Modernist Poster, with a counter-accent from Polish Poster School. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Polish Poster School Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design
-
#efe8dcground · 36% -
#111214ink · 14% -
#c8162daccent · 18% -
#007266accent · 14% -
#d6a23aaccent · 10% -
#36345aaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #efe8dc;
--ink: #111214;
--accent-1: #c8162d;
--accent-2: #007266;
--accent-3: #d6a23a;
--accent-4: #36345a;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}Use it with care
Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design: These posters are the signed work of named designers, several of them living or recently dead: borrow the method (one flat sign, two or three inks, an open field), not a particular poster. Karagöz shadow theatre is a living tradition on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2009), and square Kufic often spells sacred names such as Allah, Muhammad or Ali, so do not cut either into decoration without knowing what it says.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
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.
- Polish Information Picture Book (Dwie Siostry) 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.
- 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.
With Turkish Modernist Poster
- Square Kufic (Bannāʾī) Pairs well · Erkmen set the Latin initials TİEM on a square-Kufic grid for the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi logo, and Ertel drew on Kufic for a Ministry of Culture logo; borrow the bannāʾī grid as a structure for a mark, but check what any Kufic letters spell before using them.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · A background influence that came through teaching rather than through the poster makers themselves: the Bauhaus-modelled State School of Applied Fine Arts (1957), whose functionalism Erzincan sees following 'a trajectory parallel to the International Typographic Style', trained Aydın Erkmen and İlhan Bilge, not Ertel, Altıntaş or Bülent Erkmen, and the Academy's Grafik Atölyesi taught 'less is more' from 1967. Set a festival's credits on a column grid beside one flat figure, as Altıntaş set the credits of the film poster 'Sen de Gitme' (1996) in three columns.
- Iranian Modernist Graphic Design Contrasts · Its Iranian contemporary also learned from the Polish poster, but built its posters on Persian calligraphy and miniature; after the 1928 alphabet reform Turkish designers worked in Latin letters and quoted Kufic only as a reduced sign. Choose Tehran when the letterform should be the protagonist, Istanbul when a drawn figure should be.
- Early Turkish Republican Graphic Design Contrasts · İhap Hulusi's generation modelled figures in lithographed light and shade for banks, monopolies and state campaigns; the modernists who followed worked for theatres and festivals and replaced the modelled figure with a flat sign and, later, with type. Use the Republican posters for warmth and official confidence, the modernists for wit.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · Same city, same decades, opposite density: Istanbul's poster designers reduced a play or film to one flat idea on an open field, while the humour weeklies packed a cover with a caricature, balloons, headline band and price box. Borrow the poster's single idea to calm a crowded cover.