Style combination · Contrasts

Russian Futurist Book × Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

The Futurist book crowds handwriting and crude drawing onto rough paper; the Leningrad picture book clears the page and lets a few flat planes float on it; choose between a dense handmade page and an airy, ordered one.

From the research on Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Mix them and make something Russian Futurist Book Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Russian Futurist Book, their arrangement from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book, the finish from Russian Futurist Book. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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.

Russian Futurist Book Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Type from Russian Futurist Book: Hand-lettering
Experimental & distorted
Colour from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: Flat fields
Limited spot colours
Form from Russian Futurist Book: Stylised figuration
Distortion & exaggeration
Composition from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: Isolated object
Generous white space
Surface from Russian Futurist Book: Paper & letterpress bite

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Russian Futurist Book

Wow

Caveat, standing in for The poets' own handwriting transferred to the lithographic stone (Rozanova and Kruchenykh's samopismo, 'self-writing')

Text · Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

Thin, large picture books made in Petrograd/Leningrad from 1922 to the mid-1930s for Raduga and the Gosizdat children's department led by Samuil Marshak, with Vladimir Lebedev as art editor. People, animals and machines are cut into flat, mostly unoutlined planes of a few bright lithographic inks and float on bare paper. Hand-drawn grotesque capitals frame the picture, and 'production books' show how things are made. Pravda's 1936 attack on 'artist-daubers' (khudozhniki-pachkuny) forced it towards naturalism, and in 1937 the Leningrad children's publishing house was broken up with arrests.

Inter; Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book used Heavy drawn Cyrillic block capitals and Grotesque capitals, one word diagonal

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book, with a counter-accent from Russian Futurist Book. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Russian Futurist Book Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book

#efe4c8 ground · 36%
#1c1a18 ink · 14%
#d23a24 accent · 18%
#d6b44a accent · 14%
#5b7bb5 accent · 10%
#8a9a68 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe4c8;
  --ink: #1c1a18;
  --accent-1: #d23a24;
  --accent-2: #d6b44a;
  --accent-3: #5b7bb5;
  --accent-4: #8a9a68;
  --font-display: "Caveat", cursive;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Leningrad Avant-Garde Picture Book: These books' makers were later persecuted: Vera Ermolaeva was arrested in 1934 and shot in a Karaganda camp in 1937, the Leningrad editorial office of the children's publishing house was broken up in 1937 with arrests, the poet Nikolai Oleinikov was shot that year, and Daniil Kharms died in a prison psychiatric ward in besieged Leningrad in 1942. Do not treat the idiom as cheerful Soviet nostalgia or propaganda pastiche. Its schematic types include racialised figures, such as Tsirk's Black violinist drawn as a solid black silhouette: simplify every figure with the same economy, and never use skin colour, hair or dress as an ethnic marker or joke. Lebedev (d. 1967) and Marshak (d. 1964) are still in copyright in Russia and the EU (life plus 70 years): draw your own figures and verses instead of reproducing their pages.