Stylogenyin the style of Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)

Traditions & vernacular · 1880–1917 · Latin America & Caribbean

Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)

Also known as Hojas volantes, Calaveras, Vanegas Arroyo broadsheets

Cheap broadsheets, chapbooks and gazettes sold on the streets of Porfirian Mexico City by the publisher Antonio Vanegas Arroyo and illustrated by Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada. A bold relief picture of crime, disaster, miracle or satire sits under shouting display type and columns of corridos, printed in black on brightly coloured cheap paper, while the calavera skeleton lampoons every class.

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A sample layout drawn from the style’s design choices, until its AI image is made.

01

How it works

  • Pair one bold relief-cut picture with a shouting headline in mixed display types above columns of verse or news.
  • Cut images in heavy black line with white-line hatching and strong silhouettes so they survive cheap printing.
  • Print black on cheap, brightly coloured paper (magenta, green, yellow) instead of white.
  • Turn everyone, from politicians to street vendors, into calaveras and deliver the satire through laughter at death.
  • Reuse and recombine stock cuts across sheets as the news demands.

Mexico City (Imprenta de Antonio Vanegas Arroyo)

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Generous white space, Dynamic asymmetry, Non-representational, Straight photography, Gloss & highlights, Ornament-free

Palette

  • #151515
  • #d6337f
  • #5aa05a
  • #f0d14a
  • #efe6cf

Typefaces

  • Nineteenth-century display types

    Egyptians, Tuscans and Latins

  • Modern (Didone) roman for corridos and verse

  • Hand-cut lettering engraved into the relief block

Known for

  • José Guadalupe Posada

    1852–1913

  • Manuel Manilla

    engraver for the Vanegas Arroyo press

  • Imprenta de Antonio Vanegas Arroyo

    founded 1880; run by Vanegas Arroyo until his death in 1917, then by his family

  • La Calavera Garbancera (La Catrina), c. 1910–13

  • Gaceta Callejera broadsheets

    1890s

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Mexican Popular Graphics (Posada)’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleMexican Popular Graphics (Posada)1880–1917 · Latin America & Caribbean

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

06

Sources

  1. Patrick Frank, Posada's Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery, 1890–1910 (University of New Mexico Press, 1998)
  2. https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/art-of-posada
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Calavera_Catrina

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.