Style combination · Contrasts
ROSTA Windows × Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster
Both are Soviet street posters, but ROSTA's flat stencilled satire is the opposite of the Stenbergs' montage and distorted-perspective cinema sell.
Mix them and make something ROSTA Windows Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film 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.
ROSTA Windows Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster
- Type from Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster
- Colour from ROSTA Windows
- Form from Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster
- Composition from ROSTA Windows
- Surface from ROSTA Windows
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster
Hello
Londrina Solid; Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster used Hand-drawn, tilted Cyrillic title lettering integrated with the image and Constructed block capitals in the Soviet avant-garde manner
Text · ROSTA Windows
Hand-stencilled satirical news posters made by the Russian Telegraph Agency during the Civil War and hung in empty shop windows, first in Moscow, then in Petrograd and provincial towns. Mikhail Cheremnykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Moor and others turned the day's news into numbered sequences of crude, flat stock figures in two or three colours, each frame with a short rhymed caption, reviving the lubok as Futurist street agitation.
Archivo; ROSTA Windows used Hand-lettered Cyrillic captions in brush and pen, one under each frame and Blocky hand-drawn Cyrillic capitals for headings and frame numbers
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from ROSTA Windows, with a counter-accent from Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
ROSTA Windows Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster
-
#ece2c9ground · 36% -
#171512ink · 14% -
#c7281eaccent · 18% -
#f2b705accent · 14% -
#c99a3baccent · 10% -
#2d5b9eaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ece2c9;
--ink: #171512;
--accent-1: #c7281e;
--accent-2: #f2b705;
--accent-3: #c99a3b;
--accent-4: #2d5b9e;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With ROSTA Windows
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · The heroic, naturalistic painting that displaced it in the 1930s is the exact opposite of its crude, satirical shorthand.
- Lubok Popular Print Pairs well · Its folk ancestor: keep the lubok's numbered episodes and rhymed verses, but flatten the hand-coloured woodcut into stencilled silhouettes for speed.
- Punk & DIY Zine Pairs well · Shares the cheap, fast, many-copies ethos; stencil-and-sequence storytelling translates directly into zines and photocopied flyers.
- Russian Constructivism Contrasts · The rival revolutionary language of the same years: photomontage, set grotesques and diagonals against hand-stencilled cartoon frames; pick one register per message.
- Escuela Bruguera (Spanish Humour Comics) Contrasts · Both tell satire in sequences of crude, flat-colour stock figures with hand lettering; ROSTA hand-stencilled numbered news frames with rhymed captions for shop windows as open agitation, while Bruguera printed balloon gags in children's weeklies that end on a blow and keep the satire under the fun.
- Kinshasa Popular Painting Pairs well · Both are hand-painted satire with words in the picture for a street audience; borrow ROSTA's panel sequence to break a Kinshasa-style scene and caption into a strip.
- Turkish Weekly Humour Magazines (Gırgır to Uykusuz) Contrasts · Both turn the day's political news into hand-lettered satirical drawings for a mass audience. ROSTA stencilled numbered frames as agitation for the new state; the Turkish weeklies caricatured whoever held power, from Özal to Erdoğan, and were banned or sued for it.
- Atelier Populaire (May '68 Screenprint Poster) Pairs well · Like the ROSTA windows, each sheet answers the day's news by hand with a stark figure and a caption; run single posters as a numbered sequence when one image cannot tell the whole story.
With Stenberg Brothers Constructivist Film Poster
- Egyptian Painted Film Poster Contrasts · Painted star portraits against assembled stills: two ways to sell a film on a lithographed sheet.
- Dada Pairs well · Dada's montage supplies the method; the Stenbergs discipline it into a diagonal composition with a clear product to sell.
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Pairs well · Borrow the political photomontage cut-and-assemble method, then add the Stenbergs' exaggerated scale for dynamism.