Style combination · Contrasts

Solidarność × Syrian Revolution Graphics

Both made hand-lettered protest banners and cheap copies and answered force with irony, but Solidarność gathered under one logotype and a union, where these sheets were signed only by a town or a collective, bilingual and made for the feed; set them side by side to weigh one shared mark against many local, dated voices.

From the research on Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

Mix them and make something Solidarność Syrian Revolution Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Solidarność, their arrangement from Syrian Revolution Graphics, the finish from Syrian Revolution Graphics. 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.

Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

Type from Solidarność: Hand-lettering
Tight setting
Colour from Solidarność: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Solidarność: Folk & sacred symbols
Emblems & badges
Composition from Syrian Revolution Graphics: Single focal point
Isolated object
Surface from Syrian Revolution Graphics: Halftone & Ben-Day dots
Grain & noise

The type

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

Display · Solidarność

Rise

Londrina Solid, standing in for Red hand-drawn capitals on amateur posters of the 1989 election campaign, such as Chylak's 'Głosuj na Solidarność'

Text · Syrian Revolution Graphics

Protest graphics of the Syrian uprising from 2011, made to be photographed and shared online rather than to last on a wall. In Kafranbel, a town in Idlib, calligraphers lettered Raed Fares's weekly slogans on white cloth in Arabic and often in English for audiences abroad, beside Ahmad Jalal's dark cartoons that parodied Western films and album covers. The anonymous collective The Syrian People Know Their Way posted posters for activists to print: one figure in halftone, silhouette or loose outline under a brushed Arabic slogan, answering the Assad cult's monolithic iconography.

Newsreader; Syrian Revolution Graphics used Freely brushed Arabic calligraphy for one- or two-word slogans, composed for each poster rather than typed in a stock font and Banner hand-lettering in marker and paint on white cloth or board

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Solidarność, with a counter-accent from Syrian Revolution Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

#f3efe6 ground · 36%
#161616 ink · 14%
#d4161f accent · 18%
#a5835c accent · 14%
#e0912f accent · 10%
#3f7a3c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f3efe6;
  --ink: #161616;
  --accent-1: #d4161f;
  --accent-2: #a5835c;
  --accent-3: #e0912f;
  --accent-4: #3f7a3c;
  --font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}

Use it with care

Solidarność & Polish Underground Graphics: This is still a living, contested sign: the NSZZ Solidarność union claims the logo, and a Gdańsk court awarded it the copyright and barred Janiszewski from licensing it, a ruling the Warsaw Court of Appeal upheld (reported in November 2025), while Fydrych won a copyright case over his Orange Alternative dwarf against the city of Wrocław in 2014; do not reuse the logo, or a pastiche of it, for a brand or campaign as if it were public domain. The iconography also carries Catholic symbols and the memory of people killed under martial law and after it (the nine Wujek miners shot in December 1981; Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, murdered by security-service officers in October 1984). Solidaryca is still used for logos and slogans about Poland, freedom and democracy, its designer has criticised its exploitation by right-wing groups, and the union itself has grown increasingly aligned with Law and Justice, so do not use the cross, the candles or the lettering as decoration or to suggest an endorsement nobody gave.

Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives): These graphics come from an uprising met with massacres, sieges, detention and disappearance, and their makers worked under pseudonyms at real risk: Raed Fares and Hamoud Junaid were shot dead in Kafranbel on 23 November 2018 (local activists blamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which did not claim it), and the collective signed only with its own name, so never attribute a poster to an individual member or expose anyone who made this work. The martyr, siege, bread and Hama motifs refer to real massacres and real dead, not to an edgy 'war poster' look. The collective's posters were released under Creative Commons BY-NC, so do not use them or close pastiches commercially, and credit the collective, Kafranbel and the Creative Memory archive. The three-star flag has been the state flag since the HTS-dominated caretaker government took it up after Assad's fall, so using it, or Kafranbel's banners, as generic 'Syria' branding can imply an alignment their makers never gave. Have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, never fill a design with pseudo-Arabic, do not mock the broken English of some banners, which was written to be understood abroad, and never present a generated image as a work of the uprising.