Stylogenyin the style of ROSTA Windows

Avant-garde · 1919–1922 · Eastern Europe

ROSTA Windows

Also known as Okna ROSTA, ROSTA satire windows, Okna satiry ROSTA

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.

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A vintage-style poster with a large red Cyrillic headline shows four numbered panels of a worker waking beside an alarm clock, walking hunched toward a smoky factory, operating machinery, and striding cheerfully beneath a red sun. Red, blue, and black illustrations sit on textured cream paper within thick black borders.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

01

How it works

  • Break the message into numbered frames read in sequence, like a comic strip or a lubok sheet.
  • Reduce people to flat, instantly legible stock types (worker, Red Army soldier, kulak, bourgeois) drawn as silhouettes.
  • Limit colour to two or three flat paints applied through cut stencils, with red doing the heavy lifting.
  • Pair every picture with a short, punchy rhymed caption in hand-drawn Cyrillic lettering.
  • Work at the speed of the news: draw, stencil and post a new window within days, sometimes hours, of a telegram.

Moscow (Russian Telegraph Agency, ROSTA), with branches in Petrograd and provincial cities

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
Photomontage, Straight photography, Naturalistic depiction, Gradients, Illusion of depth, Abundant decoration, Luxurious & glamorous

Palette

  • #ece2c9
  • #171512
  • #c7281e
  • #2d5b9e
  • #c99a3b

Typefaces

  • Hand-lettered Cyrillic captions in brush and pen, one under each frame

  • Blocky hand-drawn Cyrillic capitals for headings and frame numbers

Known for

  • Mikhail Cheremnykh, who started the windows with journalist Nikolai Ivanov in Moscow

    1919

  • Vladimir Mayakovsky, drawings and rhymed captions for hundreds of windows

    1919–1922

  • Dmitry Moor

  • Ivan Malyutin

  • Amshey Nurenberg

  • Vladimir Lebedev and Lev Brodaty, Petrograd ROSTA windows

  • Okna TASS, the Second World War revival by the Kukryniksy and others

    1941–1945

03

Make something in this style

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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 styleROSTA Windows1919–1922 · Eastern Europe

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

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. Wikipedia (ru), 'Окна РОСТА'
  2. Alexander Roob, 'Graphic illustrated journalism and the avant-garde: the ROSTA windows of the Bolshevik art army', Melton Prior Institut
  3. Viktor Duvakin, Rostafenster: Majakowski als Dichter und bildender Künstler (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1967)
  4. Russian Wikipedia: Окна сатиры РОСТА (lubok traditions; stencil copies; autumn 1919–1921): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Окна_сатиры_РОСТА

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